British and American modernist poets shared a preoccupation with the importance of speech to poetry--and conversely, of poetry to speech. As T. S. Eliot put it in "Little Gidding": "our concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe." 1 He approximates Dante's terza rima in the Divine Comedy to describe an encounter with the shade of a past master--perhaps W. B. Yeats, or Dante himself--who underscores this ideal of the poet's relationship to the spoken language. For Eliot, then, the poet expands the expressive capacity of common speech; like Dante in the Divine Comedy, he writes in the "middle style" to purify the "vernacular" of the day. 2 Ezra Pound, in his first prose work, The Spirit of Romance , paid careful attention to Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia, in which Dante affirms poetry written in the common speech. As Pound would later attempt in the Cantos, Dante imagines poets creating an ideal version of the vernacular, borrowing elements from different regional dialects to create a precise and concise language. 3 Yeats, in the decades preceding both Pound's and Eliot's migrations to London, had similarly sought to rid poetic language of abstraction and rhetoric in favor of the clarity and naturalness of "living speech" through experiments with Anglo-Irish dialect. 4 He tried not to write dialect verse, but instead a poetry that sounded as natural as the spoken word. 5 And, across the ocean, William Carlos Williams pursued a poetry free of "poetic" language and European traditions--an American poetry based on the American spoken word: "It is in the newness of a live speech that the new line exists undiscovered." 6
This article gives the orientation toward speech of modernist poetry, with its emphasis on the oral (as opposed to the visual), a social context. 7 I will turn to the sociology of culture to examine the important social role of elocution teaching and the verse-recitation movement in late Victorian and Edwardian England. Following Pierre Bourdieu, who characterizes the aesthetic disposition of the contemporary French cultural elite (those who affirm the autonomy of the aesthetic) as that of the "pure gaze," 8 I will suggest that the culturally legitimating marker of distinction in middle- and upper-class London before World War I was, indeed, the "pure voice." This context helps elucidate modernist critical and aesthetic categories like those that preoccupied Eliot in his early criticism--the purity of language, impersonality, and verse drama--and historicizes their role in the public emergence of modernist poetry. Bourdieu suggests that "art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences" (D, 6-7). I will argue that Victorian elocution and recitation practices, which initially served the clergy, barristers, M. P.'s, and other male members of the privileged classes who envisioned a career involving public speaking, evolved into a much more elaborate and widespread vehicle of cultural reproduction, legitimation, and distinction for the male and female upper and middle classes. The new elocution, with its emphasis on verse recitation, had its own institutions of consecration and professionalization, the support of a profitable corner of the publishing industry, and a growing presence in official pedagogy. The verse-recitation movement, which was both part of liberal-education reform trends and a response to class anxieties that were partially caused by those same reforms, privileged oral cultural production over visual spectacle, which it associated with artifice, theatricality, and--especially--the working-class music hall.
To open out this notion of pure voice and its role in modernist aesthetics, I will examine the nexus of modernist poetry and avant-guerre class anxieties via a strange dual text--the copublication (as a single magazine) of Harold Monro's The Poetry Review , an important organ for the aesthetic innovations of both Georgian and modernist poets, 9 and The Poetical Gazette, the journal of the aesthetically moribund and conservative Poetry Society. 10 With this copublication and its successor, Poetry and Drama (1913-14), Harold Monro published and disseminated the work of poets ranging from John Masefield to Ezra Pound and F. T. Marinetti. The Poetry Society, as an institution of the verse-recitation movement, both influenced young modernist poets and provided an opportunity for them to use public performance to seek wider audiences and help popularize experimental verse. Ideas of purity of diction, impersonality, and verse drama that were discussed in the magazine became important modernist aesthetic imperatives, but each of these issues at this early period was involved in creating a public dimension for modernist poetry. Modernist poets challenged the power of the conservative Poetry Society to consecrate its own poetic taste, and thus used the cultural legitimacy of the pure voice to produce the value and cultural meaning of aesthetic experiments. Adopting and modifying contemporary verse-recitation practices and commonplaces, Monro created the Poetry Bookshop as a center for the oral performance of poetry by poets ranging from the most conservative to the most avant-garde. 11 This was an important precursor of the immensely popular public readings later in the century by Dylan Thomas, trans-Atlantic visitors like Allen Ginsberg, and even young working-class poets at the poetry festivals of the 1960s and 1970s; 12 the Poetry Bookshop's performances adapted class-based verse-recitation paradigms to emphasize the power of oral recitation to convey an understanding of formal experimentation. Above all, the Poetry Bookshop brought poetry readings out of the Victorian parlor and in front of the public.
Around the turn of the century, the proliferation of elocution and recitation manuals targeting ever-broader audiences, along with the professionalization of speech-training and its expanded role in the education system, attested to the increasing social and cultural importance of the speaking voice to British culture. New discourses about proper diction and verse recitation foregrounded the role of a newly emphasized pure voice in bourgeois self-legitimation and cultural reproduction.
Victorian elocution manuals and public-speaking primers, even as late as the 1870s and 1880s, were frequently written by clergy holding university positions and were aimed at the university-educated upper- and upper-middle-class males who would be pursuing careers involving public speaking. 13 For instance, a manual published in 1874 by the Reverend J. J. Halcombe, M. A., Rector of Balsham, Cambridge, and W. H. Stone, M. A., M. D., of Balliol, was explicitly aimed at "the younger members of the Universities, in the confident hope that the subjects of which they treat will soon be recognised in their full importance by every man who is looking forward to serve in the Christian ministry." 14 Halcombe suggested readings for discussion--Junius, Cicero, Demosthenes--while foregrounding the role of a classical education in precise verbal understanding. 15 The manual provided exercises for the young scholars who had not yet developed such proficiency in the classics, but was obviously aimed at the university-bound upper classes.
Dr. Stone's portion was also typical of mid-Victorian elocution books in that he looked to an emerging physiological science of the throat, lungs, and mouth to provide helpful speaking aids. But even Dr. Stone admitted that "speech is by no means a 'natural' function in the usual sense of the word. It is a complex and difficult acquirement, perfected through many centuries in the course of progressive civilisation" that the "intellectual community of the ages . . . must pass on" (SH, 153). Such manuals did not naturalize the attainments of public speaking; they instead clearly viewed their educated elite male audiences as bearers of a cultural heritage preserved from the ancient Greeks. Demosthenes was the model, and the future leaders of England were the audience.
However, by the later Victorian and Edwardian periods a change was occurring in the publication strategies of elocution and recitation manuals. They began to aim at a far broader audience than had the technical tomes of high Victorian elocutionary technique. Herbert Jennings's Voice and Its Natural Development began, "The present volume is compiled expressly for the busy man and woman who have little leisure time to bestow in rudimentary and arduous study"; he intended to "deal in a practical manner with vocal development." 16 Elocution was now not just for the leisured class, but also for the busy and less-educated middle class. In The Speaking Voice: Principles of Training Simplified and Condensed , Katherine Jewell Everts likewise noted that "there are volumes of recognized authority, considerable in length and exhaustive in detail, which one who intends to use his voice professionally should master, if possible, but which it is almost impossible for the college, society, or business man or woman to study and follow, from sheer lack of time." 17 The appeal of elocution, or vocal training, was broadening beyond the male elite confines of Oxbridge to include larger numbers of both men and women of the non-university-bound bourgeoisie.
Furthermore, these later elocution and recitation manuals began to employ new discourses that suggest middle-class anxieties about cultural reproduction and legitimacy. They reveal an attempt to naturalize "proper" speaking, to elide the explicit class basis of the earlier manuals. Canon Fleming's The Art of Reading and Speaking asserted that "It is an art which, with all its refinement, belongs to no particular class to the exclusion of others," and he urged his readers to "Speak so naturally that your words may go from the heart to the heart, and that people may forget the messenger while they listen to the message." 18 Fleming also brought up a theme that was to be a rallying cry for many elocution books: an attack upon the "artificiality" of elocution rules in favor of a practice that is "to make none artificial or stilted, but to help all to be natural and real." 19 These manuals rejected the rules and gestures prescribed by earlier elocution systems, but they also implied that the speech of the educated middle and upper classes was "natural," thus clearly reinforcing distinctions at a pedagogical level that accent and dialect had preserved between the classes in England for centuries. The expanding bourgeoisie was universalizing its language in a strategy of self-legitimation.
Modernist hopes to "purify the dialect of the tribe" thus emerged in England against the backdrop of a class-based sociocultural movement. Middle-class strategies of legitimation could involve an appeal to a linguistic nationalism, but within a "classless" paradigm gesturing at pedagogical reforms. Jennings wrote,
Purity of diction is the birthright of every English man and woman, and it is largely due to the indifference shown in educational administration at home and at school that our mother-tongue has been robbed of its grandeur and beauty of tone. If only justice were done to the English language, it would not only hold its own in sweetness and musical distinction, but, if we accept the verdict of a celebrated German philologist, it also possesses "a veritable power of expression and comprehension unsurpassed by any language on earth--whether ancient or modern." 20
The grandeur of the nation depended upon vigilance against impurity, which, of course, implied the dialects of the working classes. The attainment of pure voice was not just a social grace or a career requirement for the upper classes, as the Victorian manuals had emphasized, but a broader marker of cultural legitimacy and distinction for the middle classes.
This heightened concern with the purity of English speech arose as the English school system expanded and reached out to more working-class children. 21 In 1870 the Forster Act had made government responsible for education when voluntary efforts were insufficient, thus continuing earlier trends toward broad literacy. 22 In a move applauded by Matthew Arnold himself, educational reformers also introduced "English literature" into the curriculum for the first time in 1871 and called for the memorization of lines of poetry. 23 The Board Schools opened educational opportunities that helped many rise up the class ladder; I'll suggest, however, that the expansion of the educational system, which dramatically increased during the Edwardian period, helped fuel class anxieties that metamorphosed into an emphasis on speech training in the school system, on reading the "proper" set of English literary works, and on the professionalization of elocution.
The class anxieties lying hidden beneath school reforms, and especially the English literature curriculum, were stated explicitly by Henry Newbolt, a vice president of the Poetry Society, a prominent literary critic, and an occasional reader at the Poetry Bookshop. Appearing soon after World War I, the famous Newbolt Report, The Teaching of English in England , resulted from the lobbying efforts of the English Association, which Brian Doyle characterizes as "a class-based mobilisation which drew in not only most professors of English Language and Literature, but also like-minded politicians, administrators, and men-of-letters." 24 Compiled for the government by Newbolt and other primarily upper-middle-class Public School-educated men, the report noted:
Literature, in fact, seems to be classed by a large number of thinking working men with antimacassars, fish-knives and other unintelligible and futile trivialities of "middle class" culture, and, as a subject of instruction, is suspect as an attempt to "sidetrack the working-class movement." . . . We were told . . . working men felt any attempt to teach them literature or art was an attempt to impose on them the culture of another class. 25
The report revealed a fear of the utilitarian uses to which the working classes might put their education: "They see education mainly as something to equip them to t their capitalistic enemies," and cautioned that if the working classes remained alienated from the dominant culture, England might soon encounter "the hostility toward capitalism now prevalent in Bolshevist Russia" (TE, 254). Against the threat to the middle class posed by an educated working class, the report urged public schools to emphasize an agenda of enculturation through education "based upon the English language and literature" (TE, 21).
Among the things the report saw as dividing the classes was "a marked difference in their modes of speech" (TE, 22). It argued that "pride in the national language would be a bond of union between classes, and would beget the right kind of national pride. Even more certainly should pride and joy in the national literature serve as such a bond" (TE, 22). The rhetoric raised the specter of international Communism that, of course, would have inspired fear in the middle and upper classes. However, Newbolt proposed a national and class unity that affirmed, naturalized, and institutionalized middle-class markers of distinction: speech and literary taste. The Newbolt Report was only a systematic statement of attitudes that had been developing since the late Victorian period.
The focus of anxiety about the Board Schools was not just the students' critical abilities, but their speech and the role of reading aloud in the schools (the subject of a set of Education Department circulars published in 1898). One circular lamented the poor job elementary schools were doing in teaching expressive reading and articulation. It complained that "there are too few signs in reading aloud of the individuality of expression which we call 'intelligence.'" 26 Another circular sent to the Training Colleges and Pupil-Teacher Centres complained of the lack of progress in teaching pupils to read aloud, partially because the pupil-teachers themselves were generally not taught sufficiently (CS, 156-57). In other words, the faults in diction and pronunciation of the lower- or lower-middle-class participants in the Pupil-Teacher Centres were reproduced in the "unintelligent" dialects of their students. 27 One prominent member of the English Association in 1909 cautioned against the influence of the "debased dialect of the Cockney . . . which is spreading from our schools and training-colleges all over the country. In ten years' time the English language will not be worth speaking." 28 The Newbolt Report recommended training in voice and diction in the Teacher Training Colleges, and called for oral examinations to judge the results (TE, 178-79).
These class-based anxieties gathered momentum during the Edwardian expansion of the school system. Liberal reforms in 1907 created free secondary schooling and linked primary and secondary education by requiring 25 percent of the free places in secondary education to be reserved for pupils recruited from the public elementary schools ("S," 153). Almost immediately, though, the 1908 Board of Education Report strongly criticized the standards of the teaching of English in secondary schools. 29 New schools and programs emerged to deal with the problems of literary appreciation and, simply, of speech; the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, which taught speech and trained drama teachers, for example, was founded in 1906 by Elsie Fogerty, who attached great importance to verse recitation in her program. 30 The University of London and other adult educational institutions also offered courses to remedy "improper" speaking. Because the development of the pure voice was not simply a matter of public speaking, but rather part of a larger defensive strategy of cultural legitimation--exemplified by the Newbolt Report--it led to an emphasis on verse recitation and linked speech training to the teaching of English literature. By the late Victorian period, elocution had moved from the practical concerns of creating polished orators for the pulpit and parliament, and had become a "fine art" connected to the experience of literature, thus shifting the means by which elocution served as a marker of social attainment. 31
New ideas about reading verse aloud that were to be crucial to early modernist poets drew the notion of the pure voice into the discourse about the interpretation and appreciation of poetry, and about the role of impersonality in recitation. Alison Byerly suggests that the Victorians distrusted the theater, that acting and the visual trappings of theatricality--dressing up as another character and assuming its persona--were associated with deception or duplicity. 32 This apprehension was circumvented by reading drama aloud with the entire family at home, safe from the shadowy and disreputable theaters themselves. 33 The problem of losing oneself (and especially one's moral responsibility) in a role was overcome by the overriding presence and personality of the dramatic reader who read multiple parts. 34 However, the logic of the pure voice, as it related to verse recitation in the 1890s and the Edwardian period, led readers to almost the opposite extreme.
The prevalent critique of the artificiality of gesture and vocalization of Victorian elocution in favor of something more "natural" developed, in manuals specifically aimed at verse recitation, into the understanding that reading aloud helped to elucidate the true meaning of the poem, allowing a "surrender" to the personality of the poet or even to the poem itself. Against the "extravagance in speech and gesture, studied poses, artificial exaggeration of simple emotions, wooden and vulgar presentation of what is sweetest, noblest, and most delicate in our literature: inferior imitation of the third rate stage" (CS, 88), Arthur Burrell, Senior Master at the Bradford Grammar School, proclaimed that "Intelligent expression may be taken to mean such modulation of the voice as correctly interprets the meanings of a writer for a hearer" (CS, 151). Bertha Skeat emphasized the presence of the author during oral performance: "in trying to express aloud the best thoughts of others in the best way, we enter almost unconsciously into their spirit." 35 Hardress O'Grady put it more explicitly, calling reading aloud "a road to the personality of the writer" (RA, 1). He explained:
What we read silently cannot possess the same value as that which we read aloud. The music and the rhythm are obscured, they are heard as in a dream darkly . . . but if, when we are making the acquaintance of new work, we use the instrument that Nature has given us, the whole beauty of prose or verse shall spring alive. By a magic within the reach of any of us we shall see the writer's self face to face. [RA, 3]
"We put ourselves," he added, "in direct communication with the inner mind of the writer" (RA, 119). Everts proclaimed that reading verses aloud allowed the reader to "catch the spirit of the creator of them." 36
In the previous section, we saw that the practices of elocution and verse recitation in middle-class culture positioned oral performance as a component of literary appreciation. In their development of an ideal of authorial presence mediated by the reciter, they were paving the way for the modernist poets to take the leap into the phenomenon of public poetry readings--given by the poets themselves. The culmination of the trends in verse recitation, with their direct links to modernist poets, was the Poetry Recital Society, founded in 1909 in London. The Poetry Society, as it came to be called, attempted to institutionalize and professionalize the discourses of elocution and recitation, to attain the power of consecrating taste and "culture," and to influence the London school system's efforts at verse recitation. In short, the Poetry Society helped to enhance the legitimation of the pure voice that so many manuals had been approaching as a marker of cultural, and hence social, distinction. And, most importantly for my purposes, despite being a culturally conservative foe of emerging modernist poets, the Poetry Society helped to provide a unique opportunity for them to bring their work before the public.
Lady Margaret Sackville's inaugural address epitomized the Poetry Society's goals for recitation. She continued the recent attacks on the artificiality and visual spectacle of elocution: "I believe as little gesture should be used as possible, and that, as a rule, the voice alone, provided it is flexible enough, is sufficiently effective. The speaking of verse is not acting." 37 Sackville also adhered to the (now common) explanation that the relationship between the reader's personality and the poem or even the poet distinguished bad elocution from the proper speaking of verse: "There should be no striving from outside to produce a definite effect--the soul of the interpreter should be so possessed by the poem that it follows it instinctively in every modulation and inflection as easily as water flows between winding banks" ("AS," 454). 38
This inaugural address enunciated not only the philosophy and goals of the Poetry Society, but also a system of cultural production that allowed the speaker with the proper "temperament" ("AS," 456) and cultural capital to accrue symbolic value through the act of oral performance: "To my mind the proper rendering of a poem requires an attitude of surrender on the part of the speaker, and he must certainly possess a power of emotion equal to that contained in the poem itself" ("AS," 455). This cultural capital consisted of the pure voice--gained through class privilege in addition to the professional training and credentials meted out by the Poetry Society--and an education in the culturally consecrated poetic taste of the middle- and upper-middle classes. Sackville ascribes to the reciter the emotional power and cultural prestige of the author. Significantly, the marker of distinction was always the voice, the one thing that would be almost impossible for a working-class reciter to emulate. In a popular lecture given at many of the Poetry Society Centers, Sturge Moore even argued that poetry only existed when audible, and that a "curtain to hide the speaker and reduce him as nearly as possible to a voice" would facilitate the proper reception of a poetry reading. 39
The Poetry Society buttressed its legitimacy with a number of different exclusionary tactics and markers of distinction. It used the prestige of the dominant classes to advertise itself, printing in almost every issue of the Gazette its list of important titled and degreed personages who were its numerous vice presidents, patrons, and honorary members. These included nobility, professors, doctors, clergy, elocutionists, and literary luminaries of the Edwardian period, including Theodore Watts-Dunton, W. M. Rossetti, Edmund Gosse, Maurice Hewlett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Sturge Moore, and Newbolt. The Society banked with Barclay's, and, to display its respect for sound financial acumen, it even had its own Honorary Auditor. This list was regularly headed with the caption "Founded as the Poetry Recital Society to promote a more general recognition and appreciation of Poetry by encouraging the public and private reading of it and developing the art of speaking verse." However, the public dimension of the Poetry Society was in fact a restricted one, especially when compared to the Penny Reading movement of the mid-Victorian period. 40 Membership in the Poetry Society would have been fairly expensive to the working or lower-middle classes. 41 Most of the events were free or inexpensive to members, but nonmembers had to pay extra charges of at least one shilling to attend.
Like the Penny Reading movement, the Poetry Society assembled an organization to train readers and arrange events, but a key difference was that the Penny Reading organizers chose material that would be the most entertaining to their diverse audiences. At Penny Readings, poetry was only infrequently read, and humorous or entertaining prose anecdotes were the usual fare. 42 The Poetry Society meetings, of course, centered around poetry and, importantly for modernists, they also valued verse drama, even forming a Poetic Drama Society, whose activities were regularly covered in the Gazette's pages. The poetry that the Society recited and discussed was almost always that of the consecrated Victorian greats--Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Rossetti--and frequently also Longfellow, Shakespeare, and the Elizabethans. The taste it enforced was "high-brow," but of the bourgeois sort, not necessarily that of the university-educated elite. For instance, many of the members were women, who usually lacked a classical education. Almost all of the authors read were English, rather than Greek or Roman, and when the Poetry Society tackled a classical project, like its much-touted production of Hippolytus, they used Gilbert Murray's translation, looked to his advice for understanding the text, and organized meetings in local centers to discuss it; most members, it seems, were not familiar with the text and read it in translation. Another major omission from their recitations, which will play a greater role in my discussion of the Poetry Bookshop, was contemporary poetry. A few nods were made to anachronisms like William Watson and Stephen Phillips, but generally the local centers showed little interest in contemporary verse, and none in anything experimental.
The exclusionary principles of price and taste had the consequence of a distinctly middle- and upper-middle-class makeup to the Poetry Society's chapters. The organization had a central headquarters, but its activities took place primarily at local chapters in London and other cities across Great Britain and even Australia. The London branches were almost all in the western and northwestern parts of the city-- the middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods and suburbs. Continuing the tradition of Victorian salon readings, the meetings were usually held in the homes of local members, and were not in any meaningful way "public."
Anticipating the recommendations of the Newbolt Report, the Poetry Society directed their efforts at an important means of cultural reproduction--the education system. The Society intended to stimulate an interest in poetry, and it deemed the training of the voice with recently updated elocution techniques essential to this task. The Society positioned itself as a legitimating body, professionalized in granting cultural credentials. It drew upon the prestige of the newly professionalized field of elocution and speech training, and noted on its monthly list of officers a Dr. H. H. Hulbert, "Hon. Technical Adviser (Elocution) and Professional Examiner." 43 Hulbert not only trained Society members to develop the pure voice; he also examined and certified them. The Gazette announced the examinations and regularly kept readers abreast of them:
a comprehensive and authoritative examination scheme has been drawn up. Recognition is being obtained for this test, which will give it a high professional value. Primarily it is intended to apply to teachers who wish to work in association with the Society or to have the Society's definite recognition and endorsement of their qualifications, but private members will derive great benefit from it, and are urged to enter for each section. 44
The test consisted of a "cultural" section with "testing of general knowledge and appreciation of poetry"; a section on "Theory and practice of teaching" conducted by Dr. Hulbert; and a "practical speaking test" administered by the president of the Poetry Society during which the examinee had to read aloud, answer some questions, and recite Matthew Arnold's "Shakespeare." 45 Although the examination was open to members of the society, nonmember professional candidates had to pay one guinea for the exam, and up to five guineas for subsequent exams. Nonprofessional nonmembers paid two shillings and six pence per section, and professional reciters who weren't teachers paid fifteen shillings. Again, cost would have discouraged anyone below the solidly middle class.
But beyond positioning the society as the arbiter of cultural competence and oral prowess, these examinations were part of a larger move to influence the educational system in London. In a time of school expansion and reform, the Poetry Society saw the importance of primary- and secondary-school literary- and speech-training programs to the reproduction of urban middle-class culture. It kept abreast of professional activities in the field of speech education, and considered schemes "for developing its work among schools and colleges." 46 The Poetry Society thus founded a "Junior Order" designed to "introduc[e] the work of the Society into public and private secondary schools." These organizations held regular meetings to read and discuss the poetry sanctioned by the society. The society stipulated that "At least one teacher in each school adopting this Junior Order must be an ordinary member of the Society, he or she (or another member of the staff who is also a member of the Society) to be president of the school branch." 47 These Junior Orders were established in London and in other cities, and were regularly reported on in the Gazette. Moreover, the Poetry Society enjoyed a close relationship with activities in the London elementary schools, for example, arranging recitations. The Junior Orders also received recognition by professional magazines like The School World. School inspectors had noted in turn-of-the-century Board of Education reports that many Board School teachers themselves scarcely knew their English literature and, moreover, spoke with "impure" dialects.
Again anticipating the concerns of the Newbolt Report, the Poetry Society responded to class anxieties by organizing contests for judging the purity of schoolchildren's speech. One contemporary news article noted that
Not only Dr. Hulbert, but various other authorities on speech, have noticed that everybody in the metropolis is becoming Cockney in speech, a tendency that can best be overcome by little local gatherings for the study and contemplation of the best poetry and the general practice of the art of speaking verse. And what is better still, it can be done quickly. 48
The contest included high-school and college contestants, but also for the first time "a contingent from the London County Council children, and the examination consisted mainly in speaking verse they had studied and in reading at sight unknown pieces. . . . They were not picked children, and their own readings gave no trace of the Cockney accent." 49 Clearly the accents of the dominant classes had become normalized as the language of culture.
The attempts by the Poetry Society to influence pedagogy and the public's literary taste can be seen as part of the reforming spirit of the Edwardian age. But the educational reforms and the Poetry Society's attempts to influence them clearly served a class agenda, and spoke to anxieties that the reforms themselves may have helped to produce. As Bourdieu notes, the educational system helps to "form a general, transposable disposition towards legitimate culture" (D, 23), and "channels pupils towards prestigious or devalued positions implying or excluding legitimate practice" (D, 25). Education helps to legitimate markers of distinction even to those who cannot share in them: "The official differences produced by academic classifications tend to produce (or reinforce) real differences by including in the classified individuals a collectively recognized and supported belief in the differences, thus producing behaviors that are intended to bring real being into line with official being" (D, 25). The pure voice that the school system and the Poetry Society encouraged served to legitimate middle-class accents even to lower-class pupils, and the literary taste consecrated by the Poetry Society and their school programs served the same function. Working-class children could not lose strong Cockney accents during a few weeks of preparation for a contest; the institutionalization of the pure voice in poetry recitation meant that children whose families had instilled middle-class accents and literary tastes in them were the most likely to receive official affirmation of their tastes and accents. Furthermore, the working-class children's belief in their own inferiority would be reinforced. Not surprisingly, the higher up one was in the class system, the more one was likely to succeed in the school system ("S," 161).
The Poetry Society and the larger educational and elocutionary communities rallied around the pure voice and the oral performance of poetry, whether as well-intentioned reform, class paranoia, or simply a performative display of legitimacy. However, though educational reforms and the verse-recitation movement may seem unlikely contexts for emerging modernist poetry, these discourses opened an opportunity for modernist poets. Harold Monro--and the modernist and Georgian poets associated with his magazines and the successful Georgian Poetry anthologies--attempted to tap into the popular practice of verse recitation and the performance of the pure voice to bring modernist poetry before the public.
Monro and many of his readers envisioned even purely literary little magazines like The Poetry Review and Poetry and Drama not as elitist coterie organs, but as exactly the opposite: as organs for the popularization of poetry. Monro shared with other early modernist writers an optimism about reaching new audiences within the urban masses. His first leader in The Poetry Review asserted, "Poetry is said to be unpopular--generally by those who dislike it themselves. Good poetry is as much read now as at any time since the invention of printing, and bad poetry is certainly read a great deal too much." 50 And elsewhere he proclaimed, "A majority of intelligent people still argues that poetry is unpopular: it is one of the objects of POETRY AND DRAMA to dispel this illusion." 51 His readers also assumed that the magazine was not to be a coterie affair. 52 Monro wanted not to inspire mass-market verse, but to popularize Georgian and modernist challenges to Victorian orthodoxies. 53 As a step toward this goal, he accepted the editorship of The Poetry Review (also circulated by the Poetry Recital Society), which would be published with the society's regular monthly The Poetical Gazette. 54
What ensued from this odd pairing of experimental modernist poets and the proponents of Tennyson and William Watson was a battle over the power to consecrate poetry. 55 The taste for the long-accepted Victorian greats that helped provide legitimacy to Edwardian middle-class culture was challenged by a more restricted field of cultural production--the network of young poets and dramatists, avant-garde theaters, and little magazines and small presses. This network attempted to legitimate, even in the eyes (or ears) of middle-class audiences, contemporary poetry, which was largely ignored by the verse-recitation industry and the educational system. Needless to say, much energy was devoted in the early issues of The Poetry Review to defining critical practices and their roles in elucidating the new verse experiments. 56 But the verse-recitation movement and the Poetry Society had given Monro and other modernist poets the opportunity to t this battle not only within the magazines but, above all, in the public oral performances, lectures, and discussions that were the inspiration for the Poetry Bookshop.
In Monro's magazines and at the Poetry Bookshop, much of the discussion about new poetry and verse drama was positioned in the larger field of cultural discourse I have charted that privileged the oral over the visual, the pure voice over the "artificiality" of music-hall spectacle and poetry written "for the page." The Poetry Review was strewn with ads for elocutionists seeking pupils; it advertised and reviewed recitation anthologies, and even planned a special issue on verse recitation. The widespread affirmations by the verse-recitationists of oral performance as a facilitator of literary appreciation, and their paired emphases on impersonality and authorial presence were mainstays of the discussion of the "poetry renaissance" and of modernists' prewar aesthetic assumptions. Adopting the prevalent class-based discourses of the day, Monro noted of a recent poetry recital: "Miss Irwin's attempt to excite the senses of the audience was hopeless from the start . . . all her ringing of gongs and tricks with hideous limelight fell flat--as they should. . . . Poetry is not, and never will be, a music-hall art." 57
Monro found that these bourgeois principles could accommodate avant-garde poetic practices as well. His excitement about F. T. Marinetti largely derived from the Futurist's abilities not only as a modern verse innovator, but also as a public reader. Excitedly writing about Marinetti's "wonderful reading," Monro explained that "[Futurist] poetry is composed recklessly for immediate and wide circulation and declamation in large assemblies, frequently for purposes of propaganda. It is verse rather for the ear than for any close and studious scrutiny by the eye." 58 In his "Wireless Imagination and Words at Liberty" manifesto published in the same issue of Poetry and Drama, Marinetti himself noted proudly that "the number of futurist reciters is steadily increasing." 59 But the English privileging of the ear over the eye was established long before the Futurist invasion, and helped to shape its reception. 60
Even foreign works chosen for publication in Poetry and Drama affirm this indigenous oral emphasis. F. S. Flint, who regularly penned the "French Chronicle" for the magazine, translated a speech by Henri Ghéon in which he praised the new practice of verse recitation preceding a play. Ghéon attacked those who felt that poetry should be left to the pages of a book:
there is not one of the words composing [a poem] that does not vibrate physically in our mind. . . . it may be said that they recite to us within. . . . Who knows but that the poem, by its enforced seclusion, runs the risk of losing, little by little, that authentic life which it owes to human speech, and which it will always find therein so long as speech is not divorced from poetry. We read too much with our eyes. 61
He explores a crucial element of the modernist appropriation of avant-guerre recitation tenets: "these readings will provide a useful test of the new poetry, which, by its many innovations in sonority and rhythm, demands of the reader a personal effort that, either on account of indolence or habit, he is not always willing to make. He must be made to hear this music that as yet he does not hear alone." 62 Ghéon suggests that public readings aid the appreciation of formal experiment, an idea that Monro and his compatriots would underscore.
Monro and the contributors to his magazines appropriated contemporary discourse about verse recitation in order to put it to use for the popularization of new experimental poetry. Monro asserted that "It is abundantly proved that good poetry, well read, will interest the practical average man as well as the practical average woman," and that the lack of ability to recite verse skillfully was "responsible for the so-called 'unpopularity' of poetry." 63 In the effort to create a sympathetic audience for the new verse, Monro founded the Poetry Bookshop. The Poetry Bookshop opened in January 1913 in an eighteenth-century house in Bloomsbury near the British Museum. It featured both new and old poetry for sale (the former a rarity in London), rooms to lodge visiting young poets, and a room for verse readings.
As a space for oral performance, the Poetry Bookshop was literally central to Monro's hopes for a poetic revolution. He noted,
We make a regular practice of reading poetry aloud, and any one who wishes to stroll in and listen may do so. . . . We are absolutely certain that the proper values of poetry can only be conveyed through its vocal interpretation by a sympathetic and qualified reader. Indeed so obvious does this appear that we regard the books on sale in the shop merely as printed scores for the convenience of refreshing the memory in hours of study or indolence. 64
Monro proposed the Poetry Bookshop as an antidote to an increasingly visual society:
Every year humanity continues to use its ears less and to trust more to its eyes. At present there can be scarcely a hundred first-class readers of poetry in England, the demand for them having almost ceased. But we are on the way to altering this. We hope that Poetry Bookshops will eventually be established in all the principal towns of England. 65
Monro explained that a customer could "hear the poetry he wishes to buy read aloud by someone who loves and understands it. Or he can come to our Poetry Recitals which will be held twice a week, to which all interested will be welcome." 66
A dichotomy later familiar to readers of the Vorticist diatribes in the periodical Blast emerged with The Poetry Review's rhetorical privileging of the voice over the eye. 67 In 1912, Ezra Pound had criticized some of the poems in Ford Madox Ford's High Germany:
[Ford's] flaw is the flaw of impressionism, impressionism, that is, carried out of its due medium. Impressionism belongs in paint, it is of the eye. The cinematograph records, for instance, the "impression" of any given action or place, far more exactly than the finest writing, it transmits the impression to its "audiences" with less work on their part. A ball of gold and a gilded ball give the same "impression" to the painter. Poetry is in some odd way concerned with the specific gravity of things, with their nature. 68
Though Pound and Wyndham Lewis would blast impressionism far more forcefully a few years later, Pound's point is not just that Ford mistakenly tries to appropriate a practice that belongs properly in the visual realm, but also that impressionism, like the mass-cultural cinematograph, merely records surface detail, which can be deceptive. Poetry, remaining in the verbal realm, grasps essences, not just faithful visual reproductions of surfaces.
Many articles in Monro's magazines made much the same case in calling for a popular verse drama. Several Georgian poets were involved in writing verse plays, as Yeats had been for years, and the argument was frequently made that the realist aesthetics of the current theater merely reproduced the superficial, whereas verse drama achieved a more profound sense of character and ideal. Lascelles Abercrombie argued that "the great difference between prose drama and poetry drama is that the first concentrates its imitation on the outermost reality, the second on the innermost," and that characters in verse drama had "a greater precision and definiteness of design," which resulted from the "exaggeration in the shape of the speech they utter." 69 Emphasizing voice over spectacle, other Poetry Review authors made similar arguments for a "purer" theater, based on the "alive" speech of verse drama. 70
Yeats, who read at the Poetry Bookshop, and whose oral performances and verse dramas were frequently discussed in the magazine, had developed an interest in verse drama in the 1890s as a means of reaching a wider public. His emphasis was strongly on "alive speech," rather than on spectacle. To convey the rhythms of his poetic line, he had even asked a company working up one of his plays "to let [him] rehearse them in barrels that they might forget gesture and have their minds free to think of speech for a while." 71 Again, this privileging of the oral performance over the visual staging in experimental theater (whether by Georgians or by modernists like Yeats and, later, Eliot) was supported by larger cultural institutions. While the Poetry Society and its offspring, the Verse Drama Society, tried to revive interest in verse drama, educators began to explore the uses of verse drama and choral speaking in the classroom. 72
This movement toward verse drama found its modernist incarnation in the early criticism of a newcomer on the London scene, T. S. Eliot. In The Sacred Wood, Eliot frequently imagines resurrecting the verse drama in England, claiming that "The essential [thing] is to get upon the stage this precise statement of life which is at the same time a point of view, a world--a world which the author's mind has subjected to a complete process of simplification." 73 Eliot, like Yeats, saw a great opportunity to reach a broader audience for poetry through the verse drama. He claimed that "a large number of poets hanker for the stage; and . . . a not negligible public appears to want verse plays" (SW, 60). "The Elizabethan drama was aimed at a public which wanted entertainment of a crude sort, but would stand a good deal of poetry; our problem should be to take a form of entertainment, and subject it to the process which would leave it a form of art" (SW, 70). Eliot, himself a fan of the music hall, even cautiously raised the possibility that music-hall comedy might be the most appropriate form. He chose, however, to create verse drama, rather than working-class music-hall pieces. 74 Given that the context of discussion of verse drama and poetic performance was implicated in a normative middle-class movement emphasizing "purity" of diction and pronunciation, his decision, and the modernist movement toward verse drama, had a class valence that was inescapable.
In addition to turning bourgeois discourse about verse recitation and literary appreciation to the advantage of modern poetry, Monro and fellow writers also picked up the call for the impersonality of the verse reciter that had been a mainstay of the attack on earlier elocution styles by the verse-recitation movement. Monro wrote of a reading by one Alexander Watson:
Certainly his enunciation is clear, his elocution excellent, and his voice splendidly controlled; yet it was not "The Everlasting Mercy" he gave us, but rather a demonstration of his own powers, using "The Everlasting Mercy" as a medium. In the same way, Miss Nora Clarke at the Steinway Hall made herself throughout the sole element of importance in her recital. While fully realizing the difficulties of self-repression, particularly in the situation of sole occupant of a public platform, we cannot but think that the whole training of the actor or reciter is adapted to impede rather than to promote the enjoyable reading or recitation of good poetry. 75
As in contemporaneous recitation manuals, bad reciters--often equated with actors and elocutionists--are faulted for imposing their personalities onto poems, and for not having the faculty of "self-repression," the sort of impersonality that allows the presence of the author to speak through the reciter and thus to convey the proper meaning of the poem.
For an example of the ideal reciter, Monro turns to Florence Farr, who had helped Yeats produce verse dramas in London and accompanied his lectures on verse-speaking with recitations of his poems. Her book, The Music of Speech , championed Yeats's methods of verse reading. 76 Monro praises her "clarity" and the "melodiousness of her voice," but what earns her the status of "artist," and not just elocutionist, is precisely her ability to surrender to the poem, and to convey its formal qualities in live performance. 77 He hoped other reciters would "have sufficient restraint and self-surrender to submit themselves, after her manner, to the cadence and rhythms of poetry, becoming, for the time being, a sensitive medium for their conveyance to the audience, rhapsodist rather than exponent, instrument rather than representative." 78 Vincent Sherry holds up Farr's book as the epitome of the kind of oral, empathetic aesthetic that he aligns with Henri Bergson, and that he suggests Pound, Lewis, and T. E. Hulme rejected in their move toward French ocular paradigms. I don't dispute Sherry's analysis, especially since his work largely deals with the postwar period, but I would suggest that Bergson seems not to have played much of a role in the discussions of oral performance in prewar London, either in the mainstream versions or in Harold Monro's magazines--rather, these notions had been around in the recitation debates for a couple of decades. Above all, I would argue that as modernist poets looked for audiences in prewar London, they often found themselves on this oral side of Sherry's competing paradigms.
During this same period, discussions about the impersonal performance of the pure voice worked their way into modernist literary circles via Monro's magazines and the Poetry Bookshop, and, by the end of the war, they had been picked up by Eliot. 79 Much of Eliot's first collection of criticism, The Sacred Wood, reads like a synthesis of the interests and ideals of the verse-recitation movement. He shared the concern about the personality of the performer overriding the emotion of the poetry: "The interest of a performer is almost certain to be centered in himself. . . . The performer is interested not in form but in opportunities for virtuosity or in the communication of his 'personality'" (SW, 69). He also addressed the murky imprecision about whether the proper reciter surrendered his/her personality to the poem or to the poet; in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," he explained that aesthetically "significant emotion" is "emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done" (SW, 59; emphasis Eliot's). Authors of verse-recitation and elocution manuals, as well as the president of the Poetry Society, had emphasized the distinction conferred upon the impersonal reader who surrendered to the poem read; Eliot transformed this for modernist poetics by adding that the poet also must abdicate his or her own personality and emotions to those of the poem.
These interrelated notions of presence and impersonality also influenced the critical practice that emerged in later issues of Poetry and Drama. In laying out changes that would occur in the second volume of the magazine, Monro tried to reshape its critical practices around a notion of impersonality:
In spite of the admirable work of our staff of critics in the past, we have for some time doubted the efficacy of the orthodox methods of criticism in their application to current poetry, and it was only our failure to discover or invent some more compatible method which obliged us to continue along the orthodox lines. We have decided, however, with certain exceptions, to represent the volumes which come before us in 1914 solely by quotation, without comment. Thus the twenty or thirty pages at present usually devoted to reviews will be occupied instead by extracts from current volumes. 80
Monro would precede the quotations with a "Chronicle" to keep up with new poetry, noting,
by this combination between a Chronicle and a series of extracts, we hope to afford our readers a better opportunity of keeping in touch with modern poetry and deciding its qualities for themselves than they can possibly obtain by drawing their conclusions through the personal criticism of some individual reviewer, however competent and impartial. ["NA," 392]
As in much modernist poetry, the reader was asked to take a more active role, to confront the poetry directly rather than through any mediation beyond the selection process used to assemble the extracts. Juxtaposition of admired work with "ridiculous productions of bad poets" was to allow the reader to come to an understanding of modernist poetry beyond that which a discursive text might convey ("NA," 392). Readers seemed to approve of this practice and equated it with an esteemed impersonality; Dixon Scott wrote to Monro after the first issue that adopted the practice, "I admired your chronicle tremendously. It is most excellently designed--the massing of the quotations works splendidly; and your judgments have a beautiful sanity, strictness, and dignity. I envy you your power of impersonality: if I were you I'd make the impersonal my mark: you've no need to ask your I's to assert your individuality." 81 Monro's critical practice of "massing . . . quotations" was an extension of verse-performance commonplaces, but it will also look somewhat familiar to readers of The Waste Land, or Pound's Cantos. The Cantos are impersonal in that there is no consistent single lyric voice at the center of each poem, but they nonetheless rely upon the "presence" of past voices in the form of letters, remembered conversations, engravings in stone pillars, and so forth, all organized by principles of juxtaposition. The aesthetics of presence--created by importing directly both poetic and nonliterary writing (like the letters in Malatesta's mailbag)--became a far more sophisticated poetic practice than Monro might have envisioned, but achieves its poetic power in much the same way as he had exercised the method.
Modernist and Georgian poets associated with the Poetry Bookshop turned the discourse of the pure voice and authorial presence into a call for the poets themselves to read their work publicly. As much as Monro and others praised the good reciter, Monro also had some quiet doubts about the sufficiency of verse reciters to his aims of popularizing modern poetry. In notes for a lecture on modern poetry, he wrote, "Today we have schools of speech training and also verse speaking competitions all over the country, and I wonder whether those who"; he then crossed this out and rephrased the thought: "Today the speaking of poetry has been divorced from the creation of poetry, just as the singing of song has been from the composition of song." 82 Monro saw the presence of the poet himself or herself as necessary to the public reception of modernist poetry.
The readings at the Poetry Bookshop represent a fundamental historical shift in the relationship of English poets to their public. Major Victorian poets like Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold enjoyed great public prestige (witness the late-Victorian Browning Societies and the godlike public reputation of Tennyson), but it was not part of the understanding of the role of the poet in Victorian society to read publicly. 83 While the public verse reading by a poet was more common in America, by the mid-twentieth century this cultural norm had dramatically reversed, with poetry reading nearly as popular in England as in America, and the Poetry Bookshop was a major reason why.
The public space for the discussion and reception of poetry that Monro wished to create involved poets reading their works twice a week at the bookshop. These readings, or "poetry squashes," as many called them, cost only three pence--and each issue of Poetry and Drama contained a free ticket to a reading (GR, 76). They were much more in line with the widely public goals of the Victorian Penny Readings movement than the largely private and expensive Poetry Society readings. Monro worked hard to convince poets of the importance of reading, twisting the arms of reluctant public readers like Rupert Brooke, who did the first reading in January 1913 (GR, 75), and he corresponded prodigiously with poets to arrange readings.
In addition to fostering audience appreciation of new poetry, these public readings underscored the centrality of the spoken word to modernist aesthetics. Francis Macnamara, who had just read his poems at the Bookshop, wrote that
if [poets] will only give every word its natural stress, the rhythm would declare itself. This should be so, of course, in all poetry: it is the only way to mend the trouble of actors turning verse into prose. . . . I am sure that you are doing more for poetry by getting people to read aloud their own things than has been done in England for many a day.. . . it is the only way for poets to learn. 84
In spite of his ridicule of what he saw as the audience's sympathies for Georgian poets, Pound noted the value of these readings at the Bookshop to his ascetic, modernist impulse:
I should rather like to read again sometime if the audience will stand it. I find pouring stuff at that stolid mass of Drinkwaterian-Abercrombogibsonian stodge, I will not say exactly enjoyable, but instructive. I have already got rid of half a like of superfluous matter from one poem, and might with benefit continue the process.
Shd. make another programme of entirely different items, "going on from where I left off on Thursday." 85
For Pound--who by this time had already penned his first cantos--giving voice to his own poems helped him revise them into leaner, more focused works.
In Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger traces a history of bourgeois art similar to that illustrated in the pages of The Poetry Review and Poetry and Drama. He describes the development of the bourgeois category of art as one of increasing aesthetic autonomy, a distancing from life praxis evident even in the solitary absorption in the work of art that characterized aesthetic reception. 86 Monro and other early British modernists envisioned this historical transformation of the institution of art during the print age as one of poetry abandoning the communal realm of oral performance and social significance, and entering the private, stale realm of the bourgeois study. 87 Though this critique anticipates the attacks on aesthetic autonomy by groups that Bürger considers avant-garde--Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, and the Russian avant-garde--his understanding of the avant-garde as reintegrating art and praxis would not describe an activity that took place entirely within a discrete aesthetic realm. Bürger himself, admitting the failure of the historic avant-garde, wonders "whether the distance between art and the praxis of life is not requisite for that free space within which alternatives to what exists become conceivable." 88 This latter was closer to Monro's and his compatriots' understanding of the social potential for art. I suggest that the appropriation of the cultural practice of verse recitation, and its transformation of an indirect emphasis on authorial presence into a direct call for authors to read their own works in public was in fact an attempt both to reach new audiences and foster literary appreciation of modernist poetry, and to reintegrate art and life. The resuscitation in The Poetry Review and Poetry and Drama of prebourgeois terms of oral community--village readings, balladeers as newspapers, improvisatori, Homeric public declamations, the Poetry Bookshop as a "guild," and so forth--were part of an attempt to envision a reinvigorated oral culture that would escape the privatized aesthetic reception of bourgeois culture. 89 While such projects were utopian, Monro's magazines and his Poetry Bookshop were able to appropriate the logic of the pure voice as a marker of distinction in order to change the field of production and reception of literary culture, and thus helped effect a transformation of the relationship of poet to public.
The class anxieties that brought the voice and the oral performance of poetry as well as verse drama into vogue also helped form and justify the orientation toward speech within the modernist poetry of Britain. The popularity of verse drama in the 1940s and 1950s centered around Eliot's success at bringing it before West End, middle-class audiences; after World War I, prominent speech-education pioneers like Elsie Fogerty and Marjorie Gullan helped to institutionalize in the British school curriculum tenets of verse speaking that they validated by talking to poets like Monro. Though these practices involved reciters who were not themselves poets, they helped prepare a generation to enjoy public poetry readings. After World War II, and following successes like Dylan Thomas, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a poetry-performance movement in Britain that built upon the possibilities opened up by the Poetry Bookshop. The widespread readings of the period, and such centers of the poetry performance movement as Morden Tower in Newcastle owed much to Harold Monro's vision. 90 As Basil Bunting, a link between the modernists and this new generation, and the mentor of the young Newcastle poets, told them, "Poetry lies dead on the page, until some voice brings it to life." 91
Mark Morrissonis an assistant professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is working on a book entitled The Public Face of Modernism: Journals, Audiences, and Reception, 1908-1920.
I would like to thank Mrs. Freda McGregor for her gracious permission to quote from Harold Monro's unpublished materials, and the Department of Special Collections, University Research Library, UCLA, for permission to use materials from the Harold Monro Papers. I would also like to thank the New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to quote from the unpublished letter of Ezra Pound: Copyright © 1996 by Mary de Rachewiltz and Omar Pound. A good-faith effort has been made to locate the literary-estate holders for all authors whose unpublished materials are quoted in this article.
1. T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," Four Quartets, in CollectedPoems, 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 204.
2. See A. V. C. Schmidt, "Eliot and the Dialect of the Tribe," Essaysin Criticism 33 (January 1983): 36-48; and Ronald Gaskell, "Eliot and Dante," Agenda 23 (autumn-winter 1985-86): 167-79, esp. 173.
3. For discussion of the importance to Pound's poetics of De VulgariEloquentia, see Stuart Y. McDougal, "Dreaming a Renaissance: Pound's Dantean Inheritance," in Ezra Pound Among the Poets, ed. George Bornstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 63-80.
4. The phrase "living speech" is Yeats's; see W. B. Yeats,Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1952), 4.
5. See Colin Meir, "Yeats's Search for a Natural Language,"Éire-Ireland 19 (fall 1984): 77-91, esp. 83-84.
6. William Carlos Williams, quoted in David Ferry's useful essay onWilliams, "The Diction of American Poetry," in American Poetry, ed. Irvin Ehrenpreis (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), 144.
7. Much recent intellectual history has addressed the competing visual andoral paradigms in modern society and culture. See, for example, Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Vincent Sherry, in Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Radical Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), argues that the "radical modernists," Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, followed French ideologues like Remy de Gourmont and Julien Benda in denigrating what they saw as the democratizing and empathetic character of aural experience in favor of an aristocratic and authoritarian politics of the discerning eye. My exploration affirms the importance of the aural side of Sherry's dichotomy to modernist poetry.
8. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment ofTaste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 31; hereafter abbreviated D.
9. I follow Robert Ross's lead in refusing to draw an explicit line duringthis period between the experiments of the Georgian poets (with "unpoetic" language and themes) and those whom we would later see as modernists. See Robert H. Ross, The Georgian Revolt, 1910-1922: Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 13; hereafter abbreviated GR.
10. The Poetry Review and The Poetical Gazette werepublished together under the same cover. The front cover of the magazine read, "The Poetry Review (in which is incorporated the 'Poetical Gazette')." The parenthetical mention of The Poetical Gazette was omitted after the second issue (February 1912), although the two magazines were published together throughout the entire 1912 volume.
11. Joy Grant's Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop (London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), hereafter abbreviated HM, is still the definitive account of Monro's life and work. Readers at the Poetry Bookshop included W. B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Pound, Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Robert Graves, F. T. Marinetti, J. C. Squire, Robert Bridges, Walter De la Mare, W. H. Davies, Henry Newbolt, Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie, W. W. Gibson, Edmund Gosse, Roy Campbell, Francis Meynell, Margaret L. Woods, Emile Verhaeren, Humbert Wolfe, Anna Wickham, and many others, including Monro himself and his wife Alida Monro (HM, 82-83). The readings took place on Tuesday and Thursday evenings in a building behind the Bookshop, but for popular readers like Ford, Yeats, De la Mare, and Marinetti, a larger hall was hired (HM, 60-76).
12. See Josephine A. Johnson, "Return of the Scops: English PoetryPerformance since 1960," in Performance of Literature in Historical Perspectives, ed. David W. Thompson (New York: University Press of America, 1983), 301-16, for discussion of the popular poetry festivals in London, Liverpool, Newcastle, and other cities beginning in the 1960s.
13. In "The Elocutionary Movement in England, 1750-1850" (Ph.D.diss., Cornell, 1947), Frederick William Haberman traces the birth of elocution to the mid-eighteenth-century interest in improving the delivery of public speakers--primarily upper-class schoolboys, the clergy, future M. P.'s, barristers, and members of the wealthier middle classes (1-35, 388-89). While many eighteenth-century elocution manuals were written by actors, in the nineteenth century, the clergy and voice development "experts" tended to be the authors.
14. J. J. Halcombe and W. H. Stone, The Speaker at Home: Chapters onPublic Speaking and Reading Aloud, and on The Physiology of Speech, 3rd ed. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1874), v; hereafter abbreviated SH.
15. Halcombe explained that "the man, some eight or ten years of whoselife has been spent in studying the classics, will have gained an accurate and almost instinctive perception of the various shades of meaning expressed by nearly synonymous words; and, more than this, a continual habit of translating classical authors will have given him not only a ready command of words, but an aptitude for arranging them, so as best to convey his meaning" (SH, 8).
16. Herbert Jennings, Voice and Its Natural Development (London:George Allen and Co., 1911), ix, xi.
17. Katherine Jewell Everts, The Speaking Voice: Principles of TrainingSimplified and Condensed (London: Harper and Brothers, 1908), iii-iv.
18. Canon James Fleming, The Art of Reading and Speaking, 2nd ed.(New York: Edward Arnold, 1896), 205, 5. Hardress O'Grady noted that through "the vital embodiment of speech, man's gift of communication with his fellows, we shall be admitted presently to that great republic wherein all men are equal, all men are free, and all men converse together" (Hardress O'Grady, Reading Aloud and Literary Appreciation [London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd, 1914], 9; hereafter abbreviated RA).
19. Fleming, The Art of Reading and Speaking, 3-4.
20. Jennings, Voice and Its Natural Development, xiii.
21. For the history of this expansion, see A. H. Halsey, John Sheehan, andJohn Vaizey, "Schools," in Trends in British Society since 1900, ed. A. H. Halsey (London: St. Martin's, 1972), 148-91; hereafter abbreviated "S."
22. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History ofthe Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (1957; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 171-72.
23. Ibid., 161.
24. Brian Doyle, "The Invention of English," in Englishness: Politicsand Culture, 1880-1920, ed. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (Dover, N. H.: Croom Helm, 1986), 103. See also Patrick Scott, "English Studies and the Cultural Construction of Nationality: The Newbolt Report Reexamined," in Culture and Education in Victorian England, ed. Patrick Scott and Pauline Fletcher (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1990), 218-32, a special issue of Bucknell Review 34, no. 2 ; and Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 92-97.
25. Henry Newbolt et al., The Teaching of English in England(London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1921), 253-54; hereafter abbreviated TE.
26. Quoted in Arthur Burrell, Clear Speaking and Good Reading(London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898), 155-56; hereafter abbreviated CS.
27. Peter Keating, in The Haunted Study: A Social History of theEnglish Novel, 1875-1914 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989), argues that the Board School teachers had little education in English literature . A large percentage of the teachers in the public elementary schools during the Edwardian period were not even certified teachers. In 1901 the proportion certified was 55.7 percent. By 1911 this number had only risen to 62.7 percent ("S," 172).
28. Quoted in Doyle, "The Invention of English," 108.
29. Keating, The Haunted Study, 452.
30. Fogerty became the foremost teacher of speech in England during the1920s and 1930s. See Evelyn M. Sivier, who examines the importance of verse-speaking to later movements in speech education in "English Poets, Teachers, and Festivals in a 'Golden Age of Poetry Speaking,' 1920-1950," in Performance of Literature in Historical Perspectives, ed. Thompson, 283-300; hereafter abbreviated "GA." However, I suggest that these ideas were already widely popular by the Edwardian period.
31. On the connection between elocution and "fine art," see Haberman, "TheElocutionary Movement in England," 392.
In Burglar Bill and Other Pieces for Use of the Young Reciter (London: Bradbury, Agnew, and Co, 1888), a recitation collection aimed largely at boys, Thomas Anstey Guthrie proclaimed,
Go where we will in modern society, the most prominent feature "on the carpet" is the Amateur Reciter; and there is no shorter cut to social distinction, no surer method of conquering the admiration and affection of one's fellow creatures, than by cultivating the power of committing familiar poems to memory, and then repeating them aloud to a select circle of friends and acquaintances. [2]
32. Alison Byerly, "From Schoolroom to Stage: Reading Aloud and theDomestication of Victorian Theater," in Culture and Education in Victorian England, ed. Scott and Fletcher, 125-26.
33. See Philip Collins, Reading Aloud: A Victorian Métier(Lincoln: The Tennyson Society, 1973), 20-22.
34. Byerly, "From Schoolroom to Stage," 127.
35. Bertha M. Skeat, Ph.D., A Public School Reciter (London:Longmans, Green and Co., 1898), 1. Skeat was Lecturer at Newnham College and Cambridge Teacher's College, and Second Mistress at the County Girl's School, Llandovery, South Wales.
36. Everts, The Speaking Voice, 114.
37. Lady Margaret Sackville, "The Art of Speaking Verse," The PoeticalGazette (September 1912): 455; hereafter abbreviated "AS."
38. Sackville argued that "Elocution is the contrary to all this--a hardand egotistical tyrant, making poetry its slave, and reducing everything to a matter of tone and gesture, when not inspired by the spirit of the verse it professes to interpret, seizing upon it like a captive, and thrusting it into a conventional mode. It has little regard for the individuality of the poem . . . " ("AS," 454-55).
39. The quotes are a paraphrase of Sturge Moore's lecture, as reported in"The Reading of Poetry," The Poetical Gazette (June 1912): 287.
40. The Penny Reading movement shared a similar ideal of improving publicentertainment and taste by organizing public readings, but was deliberately aimed at all classes, especially the working classes, who could afford a penny for an evening's entertainment. See Evelyn M. Sivier, "Penny Readings: Popular Elocution in Late Nineteenth-Century England," in Performance of Literature in Historical Perspectives, ed. Thompson, 223-30.
41. A year's membership cost five shillings, with an additional entrancefee of two shillings and six pence. Honorary members and vice presidents each paid one guinea per year.
42. Sivier, "Penny Readings," 227.
43. Hulbert was an elocution instructor who spoke frequently at localcenter meetings on verse recitation and elocution, and he taught courses on voice training at the London University Extension program ("Lectures on Voice Training," The Poetical Gazette [October 1912]: 491).
44. "Important Examination Notice," The Poetical Gazette (April1912): 189.
45. Ibid., 189, 189, and 190, respectively. Notably, in "Shakespeare,"Arnold repudiates the significance of Shakespeare's biography to his artistic creation, casting him as the universal artist whose social identity was irrelevant to his creativity--a theme that might have appealed to the proponents of a universalized ideal of aesthetic taste. See A. Dwight Culler's note on "Shakespeare" in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 538.
46. The Poetical Gazette (January 1912): 53.
47. Ibid., 45.
48. The Star, 17 September 1912, quoted in The PoeticalGazette (October 1912): 489-90.
49. Ibid., 490.
50. Harold Monro, "Preface," The Poetry Review (January 1912):3-4.
51. Harold Monro, "Poetry and the Public," Poetry and Drama (June1913): 126.
52. Bonamy Dobrée wrote to Monro about what he, the "layman,"wanted to read about, adding, "you do, I gather, want a rather large circulation, and not a thing confined to a coterie" (Dobrée to Monro, 23 April 1913, The Harold Monro Papers, Department of Special Collections, University Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles). Allen Upward also assumed that Monro "aimed at something more than being what the Americans would call a 'freak' publisher for a coterie" (Upward to Monro, 13 December [1914], The Harold Monro Papers, UCLA).
53. The term "mass-market verse" was almost an oxymoron in EdwardianLondon. Popular poetry included the contemporary productions of doggerel; sentimental and occasional verse published in newspapers and magazines; the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, whom writers for The Poetry Review and Poetry and Drama often associated with the commercialism of the music hall; and the poets the Poetry Society espoused--Tennyson, Shakespeare, and so forth. But no contemporary poetry could come remotely close to rivaling the sales of successful mass-market verse.
54. Monro had reluctantly, and against the advice of friends, joined thePoetry Society in 1910, in support at least of its goals, if not its tastes (HM, 69). Galloway Kyle, the director of the society, had asked Monro to run The Poetical Gazette. Monro suggested a separate magazine, and they finally compromised on the joint issues. Monro, however, had to defray its expenses and give any profits beyond his outlay plus interest to the Poetry Society; he was, in addition, subject to the scrutiny of the society's council. As he put it, "I practically sold myself to the Society." In return, however, he received an assured circulation of one thousand copies a month (though he only received a total of five pounds for it). Monro bailed out after a year of the unhappy arrangement (HM, 39).
55. I borrow the term "consecration" and the notion of the field ofcultural production from Pierre Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Bourdieu analyzes the way culture reproduces social structures; he posits a field of cultural production that has a logic of its own, beyond economic determinants. Bourdieu notes the role played not only by authors, but also by critics, art dealers, publishers, theater managers, and so forth in producing belief in the cultural legitimacy and value of works of art, that is, in consecrating them .
56. See, for instance, Arthur K. Sabin's "On Criticism," The PoetryReview (January 1912): 6-8, which called for new critical standards to complement the new poetry. The first few issues of The Poetry Review were replete with articles on criticism and reviews of new poetry by young poets who presented themselves as authoritative. For instance, F. S. Flint recommended that readers buy Pound's Canzoni, adding, "A wide experience of modern verse is behind that advice" (F. S. Flint, review of Canzoni, by Ezra Pound, The Poetry Review [January 1912]: 28-29).
57. Harold Monro, "The Nineties," The Poetry Review (June 1912):250.
58. Harold Monro, "Futurist Poetry," Poetry and Drama (September1913): 264.
59. F. T. Marinetti, "Wireless Imagination and Words at Liberty," inibid., 326.
60. While Monro affirmed the oral-performative dimension of Futurism, hebroke ranks with the Futurist's call for innovative typography. In an editor's note before Boris Anrep's lavishly illustrated and typographically decorative Blakean poem, the "Book of Anrep," published in the Futurist issue, he explained, "We ourselves esteem that poem a sufficient entity in itself, and our normal course would have been to produce it without typographical or interpretative decoration" (Harold Monro, Poetry and Drama [September 1913]: 272).
61. Henri Ghéon, "Introductory Speech Delivered at the First PoetryMatinee of the Theatre du Vieux Colombier," Poetry and Drama (March 1914): 43.
62. Ibid., 44.
63. Harold Monro, "Broadsides and Chap-Books," Poetry and Drama(September 1913): 265.
64. Harold Monro, "The Bookshop," Poetry and Drama (December 1913):387.
65. Ibid. Monro's hopes for poetry bookshops in every city never came tofruition, though in 1919 one did open in Hull based on Monro's model; Monro himself was one of its first readers (Grant, Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop, 75).
66. Harold Monro, quoted in "A Nest of Singing Birds," Daily News andLeader (London), 3 January 1913, 12.
67. In Blast, Pound and Lewis attacked impressionism as merely aform of photography in its goal of reproducing the visual world: "Who would not rather walk ten miles across country (yes, ten miles, my friend), and use his eyes, nose, and muscles, than possess ten thousand Impressionist oil paintings of that country side?" argued Lewis ("Life is the Important Thing!" Blast [20 June 1914]: 130).
68. Ezra Pound, "The Book of the Month," The Poetry Review (March1912): 133.
69. Lascelles Abercrombie, "The Function of Poetry in the Drama," ThePoetry Review (March 1912): 112, 108, and 108, respectively.
70. The quotes are from Gilbert Canaan and Wilfrid Gibson, respectively:Gibson hoped that verse drama would play upon "the communal expression of the dramatic sense of the people," and return "the stuff of life" to drama. He privileged poetic drama's "alive" speech over the visual artifice of much London theater (Gibson, "Some Thoughts on the Future of Poetic-Drama," The Poetry Review [March 1912]: 119, 119, and 120, respectively). Gilbert Cannan, a drama critic and regular writer for the Review, complained that "The music-hall is gobbling up the old debased English theatre, and we shall soon be left without a theater, or we shall be forced to create a nobler, purer house of entertainment" (Canaan, "The Poetic Drama: Considered in Four Articles," The Poetry Review [September 1912]: 430).
71. W. B. Yeats, quoted in A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: A NewBiography (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 119.
72. The advent, especially after the war, of experiments like MarjorieGullan's choral-speaking methods in speech education led to an emphasis in the school system on verse drama with choruses. First produced in 1935 with a chorus from Elsie Fogerty's Central School of Speech Training, Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral was an outstanding success and helped augment interest in choral drama ("GA," 293).
73. T. S. Eliot, "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama," in The SacredWood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920; New York: Methuen and Company), 68; hereafter abbreviated SW.
74. Glenda Leeming traces the development of Eliot's verse drama, from theabandoned colloquial fragment, Sweeney Agonistes, through Murder in the Cathedral, to Eliot's later attempts to popularize verse drama by writing for the West End theaters. She argues that Eliot wished to improve the cultural life of Britain by reaching these middle-class audiences, and so changed his approach in later dramas like The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman to include contemporary middle-class themes and simplified verse structures (Glenda Leeming, Poetic Drama [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989], 6-8).
75. Harold Monro, "Readings of Poetry," Poetry and Drama (March1914): 2.
76. The Music of Speech (London: Elkin Mathews, 1909) was dedicatedto Yeats, who was often invoked by contemporary writers as an example of a brilliant verse reader. Much of the book is composed of quotations from critics and writers who praised Yeats's and Farr's own recitation methods, comparing Farr to a troubadour, an ancient Athenian, and so forth (always referring to preindustrial oral cultures). In The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York: Collier, 1965), Yeats praised Farr as "that accomplished speaker of verse" , stating that she had "one great gift, the most perfect poetical elocution" .
77. Harold Monro, "Notes and Comments," The Poetry Review(September 1912): 424.
78. Ibid.
79. Monro bears the ignominy of having refused to publish "The Love Songof J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry and Drama, but he sold Eliot's books in his store and had him read his poems there.
80. Harold Monro, "Notes and Announcements," Poetry and Drama(December 1913): 391-92; hereafter abbreviated "NA."
81. Dixon Scott to Monro, 1 April 1914, Harold Monro Papers, UCLA.Emphasis Scott's.
82. Harold Monro, lecture notes, Harold Monro Papers, UCLA.
83. Though Tennyson and other Victorian poets enjoyed reading aloud atprivate gatherings and their poems were performed publicly by reciters, the major Victorian poets did not read publicly (Collins, Reading Aloud, 26).
84. Francis Macnamara to Monro, n. d., Harold Monro Papers, UCLA.
85. Ezra Pound to Monro, 26 November 1920, Harold Monro Papers, UCLA.
86. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans.Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 48.
87. For examples of this turn to prebourgeois oral culture, and theperiodization of the movement of poetry from oral performance into the private reception of the study, see Harold Monro, "Preface," The Poetry Review (January 1912): 3-5; idem, "The Bookshop," The Poetry Review (November 1912): 498-500; and idem, "Broadsides and Chap-Books," Poetry and Drama (September 1913): 265. See also Basil Watt, "The Poet Articulate," The Poetry Review (November 1912): 501-3.
88. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 54.
89. Harold Monro, "The Bookshop," The Poetry Review (November1912): 499.
90. Morden Tower was a poetry bookstore where young poets met to encounternew poetic forms through readings and discussion. See Johnson, "Return of the Scops," for a history of recent poetry performance in England.
91. Basil Bunting, Collected Poems (London: Fulcrum, 1968), 40;quoted in Johnson, "Return of the Scops," 304.
.


UIImage
class UIImage
extends
UIControl
Represents a UI component that displays an image.
Constructor
(url?:
Stringable
): UIImage
.withUrl() static
(url:
Binding
|
Stringable
, style?: string |
UIStyle
): typeof UIImage
Creates a preset image class with given URL and style, if any.
.isFocusable()
(): boolean
Returns true if this component can be focused directly using mouse or touch, or manually using UIComponent.requestFocus
. This method may be overridden by derived component classes, but the return value must be constant for each instance.
.isKeyboardFocusable()
(): boolean
Returns true if this component can be focused using the keyboard as well as using other methods (rather than direct manipulation only). This method may be overridden by derived component classes, but the return value must be constant for each instance.
.allowFocus
boolean
True if this image may receive direct input focus using the mouse, touch, or using UIComponent.requestFocus
(cannot be changed after rendering this component), defaults to false.
.allowKeyboardFocus
boolean
True if this image may receive input focus using the keyboard and all other methods (cannot be changed after rendering this component), defaults to false.
.url
Image resource URL.
.applyStyle() protected
(style?:
UIStyle
): void
Inherited from UIControl.applyStyle
.
.textStyle
Readonly<TextStyle>
Inherited from UIControl.textStyle
.
.decoration
Readonly<Decoration>
Inherited from UIControl.decoration
.
.disabled
boolean
Inherited from UIControl.disabled
.
.shrinkwrap
boolean
Inherited from UIControl.shrinkwrap
.
.propagateComponentEvent() deprecated
(name: string, inner?:
ManagedEvent
, event?: any): void
Inherited from UIComponent.propagateComponentEvent
.
.delegateEvent() protected
(e:
ManagedEvent
, propertyName: string): true
Inherited from UIComponent.delegateEvent
.
.render()
(callback: RenderCallback<Output<
UIRenderable
, any>>): void
Inherited from UIComponent.render
.
.requestFocus()
(): void
Inherited from UIComponent.requestFocus
.
.requestFocusNext()
(): void
Inherited from UIComponent.requestFocusNext
.
.requestFocusPrevious()
(): void
Inherited from UIComponent.requestFocusPrevious
.
.style
Inherited from UIComponent.style
.
.hidden
boolean
Inherited from UIComponent.hidden
.
.dimensions
Readonly<Dimensions>
Inherited from UIComponent.dimensions
.
.position
Readonly<Position>
Inherited from UIComponent.position
.
.accessibleRole
string
Inherited from UIComponent.accessibleRole
.
.accessibleLabel
string
Inherited from UIComponent.accessibleLabel
.
.lastRenderOutput
Output<this, any>
Inherited from UIComponent.lastRenderOutput
.
.isPresetComponent() protected
(): boolean
Inherited from Component.isPresetComponent
.
.getParentComponent()
<TParent extends Component = Component>(ParentClass?:
ComponentConstructor
<TParent>): TParent
Inherited from Component.getParentComponent
.
.getBoundParentComponent()
<TParent extends Component>(ParentClass?:
ComponentConstructor
<TParent>): TParent
Inherited from Component.getBoundParentComponent
.
.emitAction()
(name: string, inner?:
ManagedEvent
, context?:
ManagedObject
): void
Inherited from Component.emitAction
.
.managedId
number
Inherited from ManagedObject.managedId
.
.managedState
Inherited from ManagedObject.managedState
.
.getReferenceCount() protected
(): number
Inherited from ManagedObject.getReferenceCount
.
.getManagedReferrers() protected
():
ManagedObject
[]
Inherited from ManagedObject.getManagedReferrers
.
.getManagedParent() protected
<TParent extends ManagedObject = ManagedObject>(ParentClass?:
ManagedObjectConstructor
<TParent>): TParent
Inherited from ManagedObject.getManagedParent
.
.emit()
<TEvent extends ManagedEvent = ManagedEvent, TConstructorArgs extends any[] = any[]>(e: string | TEvent | (new (...args: TConstructorArgs) => TEvent), ...constructorArgs: TConstructorArgs): this
Inherited from ManagedObject.emit
.
.emitChange()
(name?: string): void
Inherited from ManagedObject.emitChange
.
.propagateChildEvents() protected deprecated
(...types: ((new (...args: any[]) =>
ManagedEvent
) | ((e:
ManagedEvent
) => any))[]): this
Inherited from ManagedObject.propagateChildEvents
.
.activateManagedAsync() protected
(): Promise<any>
Inherited from ManagedObject.activateManagedAsync
.
.deactivateManagedAsync() protected
(): Promise<void>
Inherited from ManagedObject.deactivateManagedAsync
.
.destroyManagedAsync() protected
(): Promise<void>
Inherited from ManagedObject.destroyManagedAsync
.
.onManagedStateActivatingAsync() protected
(): Promise<void>
Inherited from ManagedObject.onManagedStateActivatingAsync
.
.onManagedStateActiveAsync() protected
(): Promise<void>
Inherited from ManagedObject.onManagedStateActiveAsync
.
.onManagedStateDeactivatingAsync() protected
(): Promise<void>
Inherited from ManagedObject.onManagedStateDeactivatingAsync
.
.onManagedStateInactiveAsync() protected
(): Promise<void>
Inherited from ManagedObject.onManagedStateInactiveAsync
.
.onManagedStateDestroyingAsync() protected
(): Promise<void>
Inherited from ManagedObject.onManagedStateDestroyingAsync
.
UIImage.Presets
extends
UIControl.Presets
UIImage presets type, for use with Component.with
.
.url
Image resource URL.
.allowFocus
boolean
Set to true to allow this image to receive input focus using mouse, touch, or UIComponent.requestFocus
.
.allowKeyboardFocus
boolean
Set to true to allow this image to receive input focus using the keyboard as well as other methods; implies allowFocus
.
.onLoadError
UIComponentEventHandler
<
UIComponent
,
UIComponentEvent
<
UIComponent
>>
Event handler that is invoked when an error occurs while loading the image resource.
.textStyle
Partial<{} | TextStyle>
Inherited from UIControl.Presets.textStyle
.
.decoration
Partial<{} | Decoration>
Inherited from UIControl.Presets.decoration
.
.disabled
boolean
Inherited from UIControl.Presets.disabled
.
.shrinkwrap
boolean
Inherited from UIControl.Presets.shrinkwrap
.
.style
string |
UIStyle
Inherited from UIComponent.Presets.style
.
.hidden
boolean
Inherited from UIComponent.Presets.hidden
.
.dimensions
Partial<{} | Dimensions>
Inherited from UIComponent.Presets.dimensions
.
.position
Partial<{} | Position>
Inherited from UIComponent.Presets.position
.
.accessibleRole
string
Inherited from UIComponent.Presets.accessibleRole
.
.accessibleLabel
string
Inherited from UIComponent.Presets.accessibleLabel
.
.requestFocus
boolean
Inherited from UIComponent.Presets.requestFocus
.


Locals inspired to help GRIP
The organisation recently received generous donations.
by Bridget MpandeThe Greater Rape Intervention Project (GRIP) is still striving to render their much-needed services through the help of donations from the public.
Sixteen-year-old Sameerah Karodia recently made a donation of care packs, and Golden Harvest in White River donated food to the GRIP shelter.
ALSO READ: High ranked court official arrested for fraud and corruption
Lowvelder previously reported how GRIP’s funds were allegedly mismanaged by some former members of the management team.
The allegations are under investigation, and those implicated have denied any wrongdoing. Now the new management team needs assistance from the public to enable them to continue providing their services.
Mother and daughter, Leila and Sameerah, said they want to make a difference in the community.
“I feel strongly about gender-based violence,” said Sameerah, a grade 10 pupil at Uplands College.
“The article in Lowvelder regarding GRIP piqued my interest and I thought that I would really like to get involved and assist in any way possible. My school encourages all learners to give back to the community.
“As a 16-year-old South African I have so much empathy and cannot begin to imagine how victims of such brutality must feel,” she said.
ALSO READ: World champs coming to Mpumalanga next year
She added that she used her savings to buy most of the contributions, but also approached family and friends for donations. “I have chosen GRIP as my charity of choice for the next year. I am going to paint the counselling room at Themba Hospital,” she added.
Her mother said that the inspiration came from the father of the nation, Nelson Mandela, who had said that no child should go to school on a hungry tummy.
“With that in mind, Golden Harvest always feels strongly about contributing to the needy and underprivileged. Contributing towards GRIP, that serves women and children who are victims of violence and rape, goes far beyond being needy and underprivileged,” she said.
The founder of GRIP, Barbara Kenyon, said they are happy to receive the donations.
“I am so impressed with Sameerah and that we have this calibre of young person in our town.”


|
TouchCPLib
1.0.0
A touch-enabled GUI interface based on SDL and libTS. It provides a simple desktop-free UI for your embedded Raspberry projects.
|
A base class that provides the methods needed for the object to react to touch input. More...
#include <TouchEnabledObject.h>
Public Member Functions | |
| virtual int | getX () const =0 |
| virtual int | getY () const =0 |
| virtual int | getWidth () const =0 |
| virtual int | getHeight () const =0 |
| TouchCallback | getTouchCallback () const |
| void | setTouchCallback (TouchCallback cb) |
| Set the touch interaction callback. More... | |
| bool | isTouchEnabled () const |
| True if the object reacts to touch events. More... | |
| void | setTouchEnabled (bool enabled) |
| Set if the object has to react to touch events. More... | |
| bool | isPropagateInteraction () const |
| True if the object will call the handlers of object placed below when touched. More... | |
| void | setPropagateInteraction (bool propagate) |
| Set wheter the object has to call the handlers of objects placed below, when touched. More... | |
A base class that provides the methods needed for the object to react to touch input.
|
pure virtual |
Implemented in XYPlot, Button, Text, ImageButton, WavefunctionAnimation, and SineWaveAnimation.
|
inline |
|
pure virtual |
Implemented in XYPlot, Button, Text, ImageButton, WavefunctionAnimation, and SineWaveAnimation.
|
pure virtual |
Implemented in XYPlot, Button, Text, ImageButton, WavefunctionAnimation, and SineWaveAnimation.
|
pure virtual |
Implemented in XYPlot, Button, Text, ImageButton, WavefunctionAnimation, and SineWaveAnimation.
|
inline |
True if the object will call the handlers of object placed below when touched.
|
inline |
True if the object reacts to touch events.
|
inline |
Set wheter the object has to call the handlers of objects placed below, when touched.
| propagate |
|
inline |
Set the touch interaction callback.
| cb | The touch callback |
|
inline |
Set if the object has to react to touch events.
| enabled |


modules.serial_labware.SerialDevice package¶
Submodules¶
modules.serial_labware.SerialDevice.serial_labware module¶
:mod:”serial_labware” – Generic base class for communicating with lab equipment via serial connection¶
2017 The Cronin Group, University of Glasgow
This provides a generic python class for safe serial communication with various lab equipment over serial interfaces (RS232, RS485, USB) by sending command strings. This parent class handles establishing a connection as well as sending and receiving commands. Based on code originally developed by the Cronin Group.
For style guide used see http://xkcd.com/1513/
-
class
modules.serial_labware.SerialDevice.serial_labware.
SerialDevice
(port=None, device_name=None, soft_fail_for_testing=False)[source]¶ Bases:
object
This is a generic parent class handling serial communication with lab equipment. It provides methods for opening and closing connections as well as a keepalive. It works by spawning a daemon thread which periodically checks a queue for commands. If no commands are enqueued, a keepalive method is executed periodically. Replies are put in their own reply queue where they can be retrieved at any time.
-
keepalive
()[source]¶ Dummy keepalive method. This is just a stand-in for whatever keepalive operation needs to be performed on the device, meant to be overridden in the actual child class.
-
non_blocking_wait
(callback, interval)[source]¶ Simple non-blocking wait function crafted after the Arduino Blink Without Delay example. Checks whether the time elapsed since the last callback is greater than or equal to the interval. If so, the callback method is returned and the time updated. :param callback: function or method to be executed :param int interval: wait time in seconds :return: callback if interval has elapsed, None otherwise
-
open_connection
()[source]¶ Opens the serial connection to the device. If a connection is already open it is closed and then a connection is re-established with the current settings
-
send_message
(message, get_return=False, return_pattern=None, multiline=False)[source]¶ Method for sending messages to the device. This method needs to be publicly accessible, otherwise child classes can’t use it. This method does not do a consistency check on the arguments passed to it, since they may vary wildly. Therefore such a check must be performed before calling send_message!
- Parameters
message (str) – The message string. No checks are performed on the message and it is just passed on
get_return (bool) – Are you expecting a return message?
return_pattern (_sre.SRE_Pattern) – Passes on a regex pattern to check the returned message against
multiline (bool) – Are you expecting a return message spanning multiple lines? (not evaluated if get_return is False)
- Returns
(conditional) - returns “True” if no message is expected back - does a call back to “__receive_message” and passes on “the return pattern” - returns -1 if send message fails
-
-
modules.serial_labware.SerialDevice.serial_labware.
command
(func)[source]¶ Decorator for command_set execution. Checks if the method is called in the same thread as the class instance, if so enqueues the command_set and waits for a reply in the reply queue. Else it concludes it must be the command handler thread and actually executes the method. This way methods in the child classes need to be written just once and decorated accordingly. :return: decorated method


title=Second news date=2014-12-02 type=post tags=news,news-page-2.html status=published ~~~~~~ This is my Jug blog.Here are my list of contribution This is my Jug blog.Here are my list of contribution