ABSTRACT
In the December 1918 issue, Others broke its “poetry only” policy to publish a critical essay by Baker Brownell, entitled “Irrational Verse. ” Brownell describes the poems in Others as “purely technical problems,” theorizing that they concern themselves “with limited and intimate matters of workmanship … where value is … distinct from ulterior social result.”1 By publishing his essay, Others implicitly endorses his argument that formal innovation negates any social content in the new poetry. The supposition accords with the magazine’s own claims of poetic autonomy and neutrality. Brownell’s essay is of interest not because he gets Others right, however, but because he ultimately disproves his own theory. His explanation of Others betrays the entanglement of form and sexuality:
This objective treatment of words is new. A treatment of words merely as sound materials, sensory stuff so to speak, divorced from all intelligible meaning except sound and rhythmic connotations is successful only so far as the poet can make his reader forget the general conceptions and images organized about a word and prod him vividly with its intimate and local perceptual suggestions, more indeed, it[s] actual sound sensation. Where poetry in general weds the meaning to the sound, the “others”—I refer to the unintelligible ones-aim precisely to divorce the two.2
