Confronting Impotence in Seventeenth Century Verse

Numbers in parentheses refer to lines of the poems, those in brackets to endnotes.  The poems by Rochester, Behn, and Etherege follow the essay in the order in which they are discussed.

 

      A significant portion of lyric poetry concerns love, and the greater part focuses on the pains of love-longing.  Few poems celebrate the joys of married life.  Yet pitfalls exist for the lover apart from a stand-offish beloved.  Male impotence, though it seems very nearly a human obsession to judge from the array of nostrums (as well as legitimate medical interventions) that claim to treat it, is rarely the subject of poetry.  Indeed, what the advertisements today call E. D. has been considered such a source of shame that the very subject is often tabooed.

     In poetry, of course, language mediates the gap between the reader and experience, and there only rhetoric can ameliorate the world’s woes.  Restoration poets in England, often following the lead of France, devised a variety of strategies to confront sexual failure with language in a series of witty psychologically and socially revealing “imperfect enjoyment” poems [1].  In literary terms, these works represent yet another case of the transformation of convention, illustrating the generative possibilities of literary convention.  While maintaining the same narrative and sharing significant elements of tradition, each seventeenth century poet used rhetoric to develop a distinct tone accompanying significantly different thematic implications.

     In the Ovidian model for these impotence poems [2] the persona, while boasting of past sexual performances, finds himself at a loss.  He considers whether he might be the victim of magical spells [3], a likelihood the lady endorses, though she suggests the real reason may be his having just had sex with someone else.  The poem ends with her poised exit, comely yet as she exits, having given up and bid farewell to the would-be lover.  In spite of her sprightly dismissal of her partner, the reader may infer a certain male defensiveness in the posited causes for his failure.  Neither a magic spell nor sexual exhaustion impugn a man’s identity as simple impotence might, and the poem maintains a tone of sophisticated play in spite of the man’s chagrin.  In the end the woman’s unnecessary washing indicates an agreement to keep the evening’s disappointment to themselves.  As worldly lovers, they have experienced such a scene before.

     The seventeenth century writers who composed what have come to be employ several different strategies to displace the distress caused by impotence.  In the most well-known of these, the Earl of Rochester’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” the most significant innovation is to describe the basic difficulty as a case of ejaculation praecox rather than impotentia coeundi.  Thus the problem may be ascribed in part to an excess rather than a lack of erotic excitement.  This crisis occurs in line fifteen of a seventy-two line poem, allowing the author to spend his remaining rhetoric on denouncing his unfaithful member, which he had mock-heroically praised as an “all-dissolving thunderbolt.” (10)  Though he had earlier, with neo-Platonic language, expected his genitals to “convey my soul up to her heart,” (13) (an inversion of the courtly concept of love entering at the eyes), the lover’s sexual enthusiasm outlives his erection which has become a “dead cinder” (33), a “withered flower.” (45)  Having fallen from Jovian lightning-dispensing power, his penis is now “a rakehell villain who shrinks and hides his head” (57), a “base recreant” (61), finally to appear entirely objectified, passive, and disagreeable, “a common fucking-post” (63) for porcine whores to rub against. 

     Rochester’s poem concludes with a grandly extravagant seven-line curse, a comic display in which he calls down venereal disease upon his penis, condemning it never again even to piss.  This malediction is animated by the speaker’s libertinism, apparently undiminished even if he cannot personally participate.  This motive, a kind of disembodied erotic enthusiasm, blends with the blustering tone of an embarrassed sexual failure to construct a sublimely comic picture of sexual ambition and the ridiculous self-denunciation which at once foregrounds and covers his actual lack of satisfactory performance.  The poem may be read as a satiric portrait of both the intensity of sexual desire and the ludicrous male reaction to an encounter that becomes an embarrassing debacle.

     Aphra Behn’s “The Disappointment” resembles Rochester’s in theme and in the implication of premature ejaculation.  The lovers’ disappointment is attributed to an “Excess of Love” (88); he has been “or'e ravish'd” (69), betrayed by “Pleasure, which too much Love destroys” (75).

 

       . . . the Shepherdesses Charms ;

Whose soft bewitching influence,

Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence.

                                        (138-140)

 

     The tone, however, dramatically differs from Rochester.  In literary terms, in spite of the reference to a “Shepherdess” (138), Rochester observes no pastoral conventions, presenting his couple more or less realistically.  Behn’s use of pastoral names for her couple invokes a tradition in which love songs and songs of love-longing are common, a tradition which makes ample allowance for satire as well.  Her conclusion is a scene from Poussin with nymphs, Daphne, Apollo, and Venus added to the use of “Shepherdess.”  In this pretty confection the flurry of references provides ironic distance from the bed, and vituperation, so significant in Rochester’s poem, plays little role in Behn’s.

     A more radical deviation, doubtless the aspect attracting the most comment in recent years, is the greater complexity of the woman’s psychology in “The Disappointment.”  Whereas neither Ovid nor Rochester contains any indication of reluctance on the woman’s part, in Aphra Behn’s poem Cloris’ attitude is more problematical.  Though she submits because she could “defend her self no longer” (4) and she clearly declares that she might as well die as submit to his desire (29), she still “permits his force” (14) and, indeed, seeks through her actions “to draw him on” (17).  This ambivalence is consistent to the end, saying “Cease — cease” (25), yet “each touch” awakens “new Desires” (35).  On the one  hand, the lovers are belligerents and her body a besieged city, (“the Spoils and Trophies of the Enemy” [40]), yet both are “in Transports” (53).  She is a sacrificial victim (46 and 58) yet she seeks to excite him  (103) and finds his genitals like a betraying “snake,” not for their threat but due to inability to perform (110).  She feels in the end ambivalence, “Disdain and Shame” (118) both because of the woman’s place in society which prizes chastity in respectable women while valuing sexual “conquest” in men.  Some critics have thought that the lady is merely expressing conventional objections she does not feel, though it seems far more likely that both her attraction and aversion toward sex are genuine and well-justified, though contradictory.

     Another variation is added to the structural play of the transformation of convention with the playwright George Etherege’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment” though the basic scenario is unchanged: the coming together, the unsuccessful love-making, and the lady’s retreat.  Her psychomachia over consent is dismissed as a becoming pose of “modesty” (3), such that she resists “with pleasing force” (2).  His persona views the woman’s actions as complex and dialectic; her eyes and her arms have different goals, but the entire pursuit is thus rendered only the more titillating, the revelation of her body becomes a lengthy tease, part of their sophisticated mutual erotic game. [4]  “To save a lily she must lose a rose” (14).  Yet, in the end, when about to initiate intercourse, in the martial imagery absent in Ovid but appearing in both Rochester and Behn, the lover finds himself “dead at the foot of the surrender’d wall” (30). 

     Rather than generating a flow of invective as in Rochester or the Classical pastoral tapestry woven by Behn, Etherege exploits the situation to create neatly balanced rhetorical formulae, often paradoxical after the manner of an Oscar Wilde play.   The effect is sparkling wit.   Virtually every line is a bipolar balance in partial self-contradiction.  In the poem’s last twelve lines I count no less than eleven such figures in a rhetorical tour de force.   

 

We’d had more pleasure had our loves been less.            

She blush’d and frown’d, perceiving we had done            

The sport she thought we scarce had yet begun.         40

Alas, said I, condemn yourself, not me,  

This is th’ effect of too much modesty.   

Hence with that peevish virtue, the delight          

Of both our victories was lost i’ the fight;             

Yet from my shame your glory does arise,                     45

My weakness proves the vigour of your eyes:     

They did consume the victim ere it came              

Unto the altar, with a purer flame:          

Phyllis, let then this comfort ease your care,       

You’d been more happy had you been less fair.          50

 

 

Here opposed are pleasure and love, the blush (indicating acquiescence) and the frown (suggesting resistance), finish and start, female and male, victory and loss, shame and glory, weakness and strength, presence and absence, comfort and care, happiness and beauty.  All are natural or near antonyms except the first and last, already prominent by position, which thereby receive increased attention.   The neat wit of the concluding line caps a dazzling display of conceptual manipulation in which the “pretty amorous discourse,” while disrupted in the story’s imaginative world, is so adroitly managed on the page that the potency of the poet is restored through his adept use of language.  What ends in railing for Rochester, and in something like a painted screen in Behn, seems in Etherege calculated, part of the set-up for a display of flashy one-liners.

     Rochester found enough potential for variation in the convention to write another poem titled “The Imperfect Enjoyment.”  This version is utterly different in tone from its better-known namesake.  Though the plot-line remains the same, the persona in this piece never loses equipoise.  A rhetoric of balanced periods built of bipolar oppositions presents a resolution in art and sound if not in lived experience. 

     The opening line might puzzle the modern reader: “Fruition was the question in debate.”  At issue is the value of orgasm, often taken as the measure of sexual success.  For D. H. Lawrence and for Norman Mailer in the twentieth century the pursuit of the perfect orgasm acquired immense significance.  Yet in the seventeenth century a small subgenre of poems questioned the value of coming to “fruition.”  For Henry King, for instance fruition is “the bane” that undoes love.  [5]  Rochester seeks a “middle way,” in which sexual denial only heightens pleasure and “feigned virtue” is “but a bawd to vice.” (8)  Again eliding the greater hazard for women in sexual indulgence, he treats his lover’s resistance as coyly coquettish, yet cautions that it may end poorly with “the victor’s fate” being “to die at the entrance of the op’ning gate” (37-38).  He accepts responsibility for the failure of the encounter yet, instead of angry denunciations of his private parts, he adopts a cool position of sly wit.

 

But as a prodigal heir, I spent bye-the-bye,          

What, home directed, would serve her and I.

                                                                       (41-2)

 

The poem concludes with a plea for, of all things, sexual mutuality and even a sort of temperance.

 

For love turns impotent, when strained too high;              

His very cordials, make him sooner die, 

Evaporates in fume the fire too great;    

Love’s chemistry thrives best in equal heat.

        (45-48)

 

 

     Having traced an aggressive and vituperative male voice, half-wild with the very idea of sex, self-obsessed and pushed into transgressive language in Rochester, and a more elegant though also more conflicted female voice in Behn, retreating behind the pastoral stage set, the reader finds in Etherege a more poised and polished response to sexual failure, and finally, in a return to Rochester, a measured and confident compromise.  If the anxieties of sexual performance and the ambivalences of sexual relations in a patriarchal society are not resolved, they seem to dissolve in the poise and polish of these poems. 

     Through alterations in the timbre, as one might say, of the poet’s rhetoric each has dismissed the problems of male/female relations and of sexual ego in the way of art, much as a stage magician will distract the viewer with a flourish of a scarlet handkerchief.  Yet each transformation of the “imperfect enjoyment” convention implies a specific attitude and values.  The ranting anger of one poem by Rochester corresponds to irritable frustration in mood and selfishness in love, justified by what might be called faith in the importance and profundity of sexual experience.  Behn explores female ambivalence, and illustrates the politic considerations she, and not he, must bear in mind.  Then in Etherege the reader encounters the pleasure of structural play, similar to that experienced by listeners to the Goldberg Variations.  While the reader’s interest may be maintained by the subject matter of love, the poet’s aim is less to comment on that topic than to put together becoming structures of language.  The second poem by Rochester presents the theme well-digested, thoroughly processed by a progression of authors, the rhetoric tired out by use, its possibilities plumbed, though the theme is certain to return in new dress.

 

 

 

 

1.  The term was first used by Richard Quaintance in “French Sources of the Restoration ‘Imperfect Enjoyment’ Poem,” Philological Quarterly Vol. 42, No. 2,  (Apr 1, 1963).  The French models for such poems, Quiaintance’s principal topic, is not part of the present inquiry.

 

2.  Amores 3.7 which was translated by Marlowe among others.  While Ovid is by far the most important influence, Petronius (Satyricon, 128-140) and Tibullus (I, 5) may play a role as well.

 

3.  Impotence remains a common reason to suspect witchcraft in Africa today.  The fear of “penis-snatchers” is one contemporary form of this suspicion.

 

4.  Martial provides a neat statement of the idea.  “Do you ask what sort of maid I desire or dislike, Flaccus? I dislike one too easy, and one too coy. The just mean, which lies between the two extremes, is what I approve; I like neither that which tortures, nor that which cloys.” (1,57  “To Flaccus”)

 

5.  King’s “Paradox. That Fruition Destroyes Love” says

Fruition therefore is the bane t'undoe

Both our affection and the subject too.

'Tis Love into worse language to translate,

And make it into Lust degenerate.

Suckling wrote two poems against fruition, and Aphra Behn “To Alexis in Answer to his Poem against Fruition.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Imperfect Enjoyment

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

 

Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,

I filled with love, and she all over charms;

Both equally inspired with eager fire,

Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.

With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace,             [5]

She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.

Her nimble tongue, Love’s lesser lightening, played

Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed

Swift orders that I should prepare to throw

The all-dissolving thunderbolt below.                              [10]

My fluttering soul, sprung with the painted kiss,

Hangs hovering o’er her balmy brinks of bliss.

But whilst her busy hand would guide that part

Which should convey my soul up to her heart,

In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,                                 [15]

Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.

A touch from any part of her had done’t:

Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt.

Smiling, she chides in a kind murmuring noise,

And from her body wipes the clammy joys,                 [20]

When, with a thousand kisses wandering o’er

My panting bosom, “Is there then no more?"

She cries. “All this to love and rapture’s due;

Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?"

But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive,                         [25]

To show my wished obedience vainly strive:

I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.

Eager desires confound my first intent,

Succeeding shame does more success prevent,

And rage at last confirms me impotent.                       [30]

Ev’n her fair hand, which might bid heat return

To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn,

Applied to my dead cinder, warms no more

Than fire to ashes could past flames restore.

Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry,            [35]

A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.

This dart of love, whose piercing point, oft tried,

With virgin blood ten thousand maids have dyed;

Which nature still directed with such art

That it through every cunt reached every heart — [40]

Stiffly resolved, ’twould carelessly invade

Woman or man, nor aught its fury stayed:

Where’er it pierced, a cunt it found or made —

Now languid lies in this unhappy hour,

Shrunk up and sapless like a withered flower.          [45]

 

Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,

False to my passion, fatal to my fame,

Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove

So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?

What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore            [50]

Didst thou e’er fail in all thy life before?

When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way,

With what officious haste dost thou obey!

Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets

Who scuffles, cuffs, and justles all he meets,          [55]

But if his king or country claim his aid,

The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head;

Ev’n so thy brutal valour is displayed,

Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade,

But when great Love the onset does command,    [60]

Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar’st not stand.

Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most,

Through all the town a common fucking-post,

On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt

As hogs do rub themselves on gates and grunt,    [65]

May’st thou to ravenous chancres be a prey,

Or in consuming weepings waste away;

May strangury and stone thy days attend;

May’st thou ne’er piss, who did refuse to spend

When all my joys did on false thee depend.           [70]

 

   And may ten thousand abler pricks agree

   To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.

 

 

 

The Disappointment

Aphra Behn

 

1

ONE Day the Amarous Lisander,

By an impatient Passion sway’d,

Surpris’d fair Cloris, that lov’d Maid,

Who cou’d defend her self no longer ;

All things did with his Love conspire,

The gilded Planet of the Day,

In his gay Chariot, drawn by Fire,

Was now descending to the Sea,

And left no Light to guide the World,

But what from Cloris brighter Eyes was hurl’d.     10

 

2

In alone Thicket, made for Love,

Silent as yielding Maids Consent,

She with a charming Languishment

Permits his force, yet gently strove ?

Her Hands his Bosom softly meet,

But not to put him back design’d,

Rather to draw him on inclin’d,

Whilst he lay trembling at her feet;

Resistance ’tis to late to shew,

She wants the pow’r to say — Ah! what do you do? 20

 

3

Her bright Eyes sweat, and yet Severe,

Where Love and Shame confus’dly strive,

Fresh Vigor to Lisander give :

And whispring softly in his Ear,

She Cry’d — Cease — cease — your vain desire,

Or I’ll call out — What wou’d you do ?

My dearer Honour, ev’n to you,

I cannot — must not give — retire,

Or take that Life whose chiefest part

I gave you with the Conquest of my Heart.             30

 

4

But he as much unus’d to fear,

As he was capable of Love,

The blessed Minutes to improve,

Kisses her Lips, her Neck, her Hair !

Each touch her new Desires alarms !

His burning trembling Hand he prest

Upon her melting Snowy Breast,

While she lay panting in his Arms !

All her unguarded Beauties lie

The Spoils and Trophies of the Enemy.                    40

 

5

And now, without Respect or Fear,

He seeks the Objects of his Vows ;

His Love no Modesty allows :

By swift degrees advancing where

His daring Hand that Alter seiz’d,

Where Gods of Love do Sacrifice ;

That awful Throne, that Paradise,

Where Rage is tam’d, and Anger pleas’d ;

That Living Fountain, from whose Trills

The melted Soul in liquid Drops distils.                   50

 

6

Her balmy Lips encountring his,

Their Bodies as their Souls are joyn’d,

Where both in Transports were confin’d,

Extend themselves upon the Moss.

Cloris half dead and breathless lay,

Her Eyes appear’d like humid Light,

Such as divides the Day and Night;

Or falling Stars, whose Fires decay ;

And now no signs of Life she shows,  cont

But what in short-breath-sighs returns and goes. 60

 

7

He saw how at her length she lay,

He saw her rising Bosom bare,

Her loose thin Robes, through which appear

A Shape design’d for Love and Play;

Abandon’d by her Pride and Shame,

She do’s her softest Sweets dispence,

Offring her Virgin-Innocence

A Victim to Loves Sacred Flame ;

Whilst th’ or’e ravish’d Shepherd lies,

Unable to perform the Sacrifice.                               70

 

8

Ready to taste a Thousand Joys,

Thee too transported hapless Swain,

Found the vast Pleasure turn’d to Pain :

Pleasure, which too much Love destroys !

The willing Garments by he laid,

And Heav’n all open to his view ;

Mad to possess, himself he threw

On the defenceless lovely Maid.

But oh ! what envious Gods conspire

To snatch his Pow’r, yet leave him the Desire !      80

 

9

Natures support, without whose Aid

She can no humane Being give,

It self now wants the Art to live,

Faintness it slacken’d Nerves invade :

In vain th’ enraged Youth assaid

To call his fleeting Vigour back,

No Motion ’twill from Motion take,

Excess of Love his Love betray’d ;

In vain he Toils, in vain Commands,

Th’ Insensible fell weeping in his Hands.                     90

 

 10

In this so Am’rous cruel strife,

Where Love and Fate were too severe,

The poor Lisander in Despair,

Renounc’d his Reason with his Life.

Now all the Brisk and Active Fire

That should the Nobler Part inflame,

Unactive Frigid, Dull became,

And left no Spark for new Desire ;

Not all her Naked Charms cou’d move,

Or calm that Rage that had debauch’d his Love.      100

 

11

Cloris returning from the Trance

Which Love and soft Desire had bred,

Her tim’rous Hand she gently laid,

Or guided by Design or Chance,

Upon that Fabulous Priapus,

That Potent God (as Poets feign.)

But never did young Shepherdess

(Gath’ring of Fern upon the Plain)

More nimbly draw her Fingers back,

Finding beneath the Verdant Leaves a Snake.           110

 

12

Then Cloris her fair Hand withdrew,

Finding that God of her Desires

Disarm’d of all his pow’rful Fires,

And cold as Flow’rs bath’d in the Morning-dew.

Who can the Nymphs Confusion guess ?

The Blood forsook the kinder place,

And strew’d with Blushes all her Face,

Which both Disdain and Shame express ;

And from Lisanders Arms she fled,

Leaving him fainting on the gloomy Bed.                   120

 

13

Like Lightning through the Grove she hies,

Or Daphne from the Delphick God ;

No Print upon the Grassie Road

She leaves, t’ instruct pursuing Eyes.

The Wind that wanton’d in her Hair,

And with her ruffled Garments plaid,

Discover’d in the flying Maid

All that the Gods e’re made of Fair.

So Venus, when her Love was Slain,

With fear and haste flew o’re the fatal Plain.            130

 

14

The Nymphs resentments, none but I

Can well imagin, and Condole ;

But none can guess Lisander‘s Soul,

But those who sway’d his Destiny :

His silent Griefs, swell up to Storms,

And not one God, his Fury spares,

He Curst his Birth, his Fate, his Stars,

But more the Shepherdesses Charms ;

Whose soft bewitching influence,

Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence.                 140

 

 

 

The Imperfect Enjoyment

Sir George Etherege

 

AFTER a pretty amorous discourse,          

She does resist my love with pleasing force;        

Moved not with anger, but with modesty,            

Against her will she is my enemy.             

Her eyes the rudeness of her arms excuse,                   5

Whilst those accept what these seem to refuse; 

To ease my passion and to make me blest            

The obliging smock falls from her whiter breast.

Then with her lovely hands she does conceal      

Those wonders chance so kindly did reveal.                  10

In vain, alas! her nimble fingers strove   

To shield her beauties from my greedy love:       

Guarding her breasts, her lips she did expose,    

To save a lily she must lose a rose.          

So many charms she has in every place,                     15

A hundred hands cannot defend each grace.       

Sighing at length her force she does recall,          

For since I must have part she’ll give me all.        

Her arms the joyful conqueror embrace,              

And seem to guide me to the sought-for place:           20

Her love is in her sparkling eyes express’d,           

She falls o’ the bed for pleasure more than rest.

But oh, strange passion! oh, abortive joy!            

My zeal does my devotion quite destroy:             

Come to the temple where I should adore                    25

My saint, I worship at the sacred door;  

Oh, cruel chance! the town which did oppose     

My strength so long, now yields to my dispose;  

When overjoy’d with victory I fall            

Dead at the foot of the surrender’d wall,                       30

Without the usual ceremony, we             

Have both fulfilled the amorous mystery;             

The action which we should have jointly done,   

Each has unluckily perform’d alone;        

The union which our bodies should enjoy,                    35

The union of our eager souls destroy.     

Our flames are punish’d by their own excess,     

We’d had more pleasure had our loves been less.            

She blush’d and frown’d, perceiving we had done            

The sport she thought we scarce had yet begun.         40

Alas, said I, condemn yourself, not me,  

This is th’ effect of too much modesty.   

Hence with that peevish virtue, the delight          

Of both our victories was lost i’ the fight;             

Yet from my shame your glory does arise,                     45

My weakness proves the vigour of your eyes:     

They did consume the victim ere it came              

Unto the altar, with a purer flame:          

Phyllis, let then this comfort ease your care,       

You’d been more happy had you been less fair.          50

 

 

 

The Imperfect Enjoyment

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

 

Fruition was the question in debate,       

Which like so hot a casuist I state,           

That she my freedom urged as my offense          

To teach my reason to subdue my sense;             

But yet this angry cloud, that did proclaim                    5

Volleys of thunder, melted into rain;       

And this adult’rate stamp of seeming nice,          

Made feigned virtue but a bawd to vice;

For, by a compliment that’s seldom known,         

She thrusts me out, and yet invites me home;              10

And these denials, but advance delight, 

As prohibition sharpens appetite;            

For the kind curtain raising my esteem,  

To wonder as the opening of the scene, 

When of her breast her hands the guardians were,    15

Yet I salute each sullen officer:  

Tho’ like the flaming sword before my eyes,        

They block the passage to my paradise; 

Nor could those tyrant-hands so guard the coin,

But love, where’t cannot purchase, may purloin:         20

For tho’ her breasts are hid, her lips are prize,    

To make me rich beyond my avarice;      

Yet my ambition my affection fed,           

To conquer both the white rose and the red.      

The event proved true, for on the bed she sate           25

And seemed to court what she had seemed to hate;       

Heat of resistance had increased her fire,            

And weak defense is turned to strong desire.      

What unkind influence could interspose,              

When two such stars did in conjunction close?            30

Only too hasty zeal my hopes did foil,    

Pressing to feed her lamp, I spilt my oil; 

And that which most reproach upon me hurled, 

Was dead to her, gives life to all the world,         

Nature’s chief prop, and motion’s primest source,      35

In me lost both their figure and their force.         

Sad conquest! When it is the victor’s fate,           

To die at the entrance of the op’ning gate:          

Like prudent corporations had we laid    

A common stock by, we’d improved our trade;            40

But as a prodigal heir, I spent bye-the-bye,          

What, home directed, would serve her and I.     

When next in such assaults I chance to be,          

Give me less vigour, more activity;          

For love turns impotent, when strained too high;      45

His very cordials, make him sooner die, 

Evaporates in fume the fire too great;    

Love’s chemistry thrives best in equal heat.         

Trouble in Elysium: Carew’s “A Rapture”

Parenthetical numerical references are to the lines of the poem. Endnotes are in brackets.


     A purely libertine poem is possible, but it must be very short. [1] With even modest amplitude, the complexities, ambiguities, ambivalences, and mysteries of Eros will almost inevitably emerge, often with little regard for the author’s conscious intention. The libertinism of Thomas Carew’s “A Rapture,” which attracted opprobrium as well as readers since its composition, is justified by an argument for enthusiastic utopian free love, yet the poem is laced with contradictions. Its joyful sensual hedonism is broken by nastiness and self-doubt, and the females who appear at times as independent sexual agents seem at others mere passive commodities. Such incongruities are part of the very structure of the poem which mixes literary genres in a continual play with reader expectations. [2]
     Carew embodied the Cavalier values expressed in the carpe diem poems of Herrick, Suckling, and Lovelace. [3] He was himself a courtier, holding offices such as server or “taster in ordinary” to the king, though his behavior was not shaped by a wish to avoid scandal. His reputation as a rake and a wit was well enough, but his excesses went beyond those typical of the privileged of the day. Thoughts of reform may well have come to him once his health was failing. The Earl of Clarendon noted that "after fifty years of life spent with less severity and exactness than it ought to have been, he died with the greatest remorse for that licence.” [4]
     However that may be, “A Rapture” seems at first glance an assertive defense of free love. It is difficult to mistake the antinomianism of some of Carew’s lines.


          All things are lawful there, that may delight
          Nature or unrestrained appetite ;
                                                        (111-112)

          We only sin when Love's rites are not done.
                                                       (114)


     His claim is not merely that all is permitted; he further insists that bliss and blessedness are certain to result. This is the central significance of the equation between sexual experience and paradise, figured as a blissful shore (9), a heavenly spot occupied by “blest shades” (24), where choirs sing paeans to the “deity of love” (47); love makes, in fact, Elysium (2 and 110). The woman is as enthusiastic as the man; she is, after all “free” (20 and 150), they both have “necks unyoked.” (151). He refers to “our joys” (147) as wholly mutual. He uses political language, saying that he can enjoy her body because he is “enfranchised.” (29), that those who accept conventional morality are slaves to a tyrant (144) who has usurped (150) the place that should belong to Beauty and Nature (26).
     The liberty and equality of the couple is problematized, however, by the poet’s imagery. All the elaborately pretty accoutrements of the locus amoenus cannot conceal the fact that the lady is most passive. She is an ivory carving (30), a thing of snow (28, 72) and gold (28). It may be commonplace to call one’s beloved a “treasure” (32, 56), but Carew’s financial language goes further. She is a “mine” (33), potential children are “coinage” (35), the regrets of those who had been modest become their payment of “double rent” to “Love's exchequer” (146).
     He manages even a few acrobatic image systems in which the female is twice passive. She is the sea (81) and yet she is also the harbor (87), while he, the ship, moves through both. In another passage women are at first flowers, rose, violet, and others (63-64) visited by the active male bee and then Celia is the beehive to which the active bee returns (78).
     Mythological references allow writers to introduce complexes of narrative, often elaborated in meaning by a history of usage, with a single word. Carew’s are curiously at cross purposes with the trajectory of his argument. [5] He cites Danae, Daphne, and Lucrece as though they were women who notoriously enjoyed passionate love, though all were raped while seeking to avoid sexual contact, as well as Penelope, legendary for fidelity to her long-absent husband, and Laura, Petrarch’s highly idealized love. The inevitable effect of these references, after an initial quizzical surprise, is to undermine Carew’s contention that sex makes all things well.
     The conclusion of the poem undercuts the ostensible theme most dramatically. Though “Honour” and morality in various forms had been ridiculed at the outset as a bugaboo and imposter one might readily ignore. The malevolent giant returns however (154 ff.), reminding Carew that he would be honor-bound under certain circumstances to fight a duel, despite the disapproval of the church. Here he does not question social convention, but assumes he would have no choice but to ignore Christian teaching in favor of his culture’s expectations. With suddenness and drama he equates that dilemma with his lady’s free sexual practice, calling her by the same name the most conservative prig might use: “whore” (166). The reader must feel very far indeed from Elysium. [6]
     Surely it is unlikely that the author is clumsily attempting Celia’s seduction while unaware of the ambiguities, nor does it work as a cynical display of self-interest whose very incongruities make it the more amusing. One doubts that Carew is simply confused, except in the sense that we all are confused. Surely each of the positions suggested by the poem has a sort of truth. Doubtless Carew did fantasize at times that he might occupy a prelapsarian paradise with unlimited orgasms for all, while on other occasions he felt the notoriety that reminded him he did not live in Elysium. He may well have felt respect and concern for the wishes of one woman at one time, while thoughtlessly wishing to take possession of another. His jumble of literary genres and his self-defeating use of allusion are among the signs that he was well aware of his own contradictions. Not knowing what else to make of them, he made a nicely turned poem.





1. The same is true of a poem of unadulterated "romantic" love.

2. A critic has delineated the role of “pastoral, Ovidian epyllion, carpe diem seduction lyric, [and] elegiac couplets.” See Laura Alexander Linker’s “Goblins of Desire: Carew's Libertine Women in ‘A Rapture’" CEA Critic vol. 69, no. 3 (spring and summer 2007), pp. 1-12.

3. Metaphysicals and cavaliers were not always as clearly distinguished in life as in reductive histories. Donne, from whom Carew borrowed much, was court preacher to Charles I during Carew’s service there and Carew had earlier spent time in the service of Baron Herbert of Cherbury, George Herbert’s brother. His use of the name Celia and his smooth and melodious lines suggest affinities with Jonson and the Cavaliers, while his use of elegiac and heroic couplets foreshadows neo-Classicism. “A Rapture” is most clearly influenced by Volpone III, ii and Donne’s Elegy XIX.

4. Earl of Clarendon, Life and Continuation.

5. The point is thoroughly developed in Laura Alexander Linker’s excellent essay cited in note 2.

6. Moderns would be even more outraged to read Carew’s “The Second Rapture” in which he declares that wealth, honor, family, long life, all are mere “shadows of felicity” when compared with a “wench about thirteen,” though, to be sure, she should be already experienced, “Already voted to the queen/
Of lust and lovers.”

The Fetish of the Primitive in Twentieth Century Art

This is a work in progress, the current draft of a lecture I will deliver in the spring or summer at the Seligmann Center’s Robert Fagan Library which includes a substantial share of books describing non-European art. Kurt Seligmann himself not only traveled around the world in 1936 but made a further trip to the American Pacific Northwest in 1938 where he purchased a magnificent totem pole now on display at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.


     The visitor to my home will see West African carvings from Benin and Urhobo artists, masks from the Tarahumara of the Mexican Sierra Madre Occidental, weavings from the Maghreb, a Cambodian wooden Buddha, set among dozens of other artifacts collected during a lifetime of travel. Doubtless these are simple souvenirs like the decals of Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon people used to place in their car windows, yet to my mind they also provide a potent reminder of the nature of art, displayed as they are among contemporary drawings and paintings, many by my wife or by friends and acquaintances. Thus I am no scholar claiming a fictitious objectivity; rather I am myself a participant in the fetishization I mean to discuss. Far from casting doubt on my conclusion, this involvement seems to me to provide life and blood to my inquiry.
     The articulation of connections between the twentieth century artistic avant-garde and the idea of the primitive is hardly a simple pattern of influence or inspiration. The revaluation of so-called “primitive art” [1] as well as folk art, outsider art, and children’s art by sophisticated European artists, critics, and intellectuals has been a significant influence in poetry and music as well as visual art. In many cases the use of “the primitive” requires little or no specific reference to indigenous art but signifies primarily either a rebellious inversion of received ideas or a more general claim to artistic freedom. In fact, the primitive has been used as a fetish, very much in the historical and anthropological use of the word which originally, like poem, meant simply an artificially constructed object, which is to say, a work of art, but which was used by Portuguese mariners to describe West African objects charged with power by human imagination. Just as the Africans infused their masks and charms with juju, and Polynesians with mana, so, in turn, the European artists gave those same objects a new sort of force, replacing the contempt with which their white ancestors had viewed the “superstition” of what seemed lower races, with respect and even awe. The art was cut free from the world-view of its creators and made to serve instead the purposes of its modern discoverers.
     Though many in the nineteenth century subscribed to an evolutionary view of human development in which the most recent developments were considered the “highest,” a significant faction of artists dissented, finding value in what was generally rejected or ignored. Especially since the Romantic era, the mythic projection of the “primitive” as Other meant that such art was seen by a counter-culture as having greater access to emotion, truth, and the divine than that produced by etiolated Europeans throttled by self-consciousness and decadence. In this polemical reaction against prevailing values, artists conflated all “primitives” into a single category and sometimes also included children, mental patients, peasants, and women as fundamentally similar.
     Such symbolic use of primitive as Other charging it with significance it would not otherwise bear is in fact an ancient and universal topos, far too vast a topic to treat here. It was sophisticated urban Greeks that invented the poetic pastoral, presenting poetry with shepherds as personae, sometimes for comic effect, but often as ideal lovers. Theocritus was an Alexandrian but wrote in the voice of a Sicilian shepherd, and one of the themes of Classical pastoralism is the superiority of rural life to that of the corrupt cities. For Ovid the primal age was Golden without armies, judges, or even labor. [2] It was to this mythic era that Rousseau refers in The Social Contract which opens “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” His Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men maintains, as Engels was to do a century later, that originally men lived in a utopian communist state and that private property is the source of classes and inequality.
     During the Romantic Era the polarity received renewed attention. The Romantics privileged emotion and intuition over rationality, spontaneity over craft, originality over tradition, and the primitive over the civilized. Thus in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth says he has decided to “chuse incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men [that is to say, not in literary or learned language].” He goes on, “Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated.” [3]
     The celebration of the “primitive” was evident as well in the new-found attention and respect oral literature received from Percy in England, Burns in Scotland, Herder, von Arnim, Brentano, and the Grimm brothers in Germany. The nationalist impetus during the nineteenth century led to the recognition and use of folk motifs in music by composers such as Lvov, Chopin, Sibelius, and Dvořák the last of whom declared that "In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music." [4] Meanwhile on the level of popular culture minstrel shows were the leading form of musical entertainment in nineteenth century America. [5]
     With the growth of colonialism, knowledge about the actual circumstances of other societies became more widespread and the curious could view non-European artifacts, not in art museums but in new institutions whose galleries were entirely devoted to ethnographic displays. Napoleon’s Egyptian campaigns led to the popularity of “oriental” scenes which increased in popularity throughout the century in both France and Britain, particularly as an avenue of presenting “harem” scenes or other female nudes. [6] By the end of the nineteenth century not only had European museum collections of colonial art swollen; in addition, the general public was exposed to such work at expositions such as the 1889 Paris World’s Fair and the 1908 Franco-British show in London which included “indigenous villages.” [7]
     Scholars had, for the first time, sufficient fairly accurate information about oral cultures to generalize in such works as Primitive Culture (1871) by E. B. Tylor, the “father of cultural anthropology,” James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890), and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910). As the title of Lévy-Bruhl’s work reveals, these authors generally took an evolutionary approach, regarding the thought processes of the societies they studied as quite different from those of the moderns studying them. [8]
    A significant number of artists and intellectuals accepted this sort of conventional judgment, but reversed the values, preferring the primitive. For this reason artists in France left the metropolis for Pont-Aven in Brittany, thinking it more backward and thus Edenic. Long before setting out for the South Seas, Gauguin wrote “I love Brittany. I find something savage, primitive here.” [9] He was joined by Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, and others, while German artists were forming similar colonies for the same reasons in Worpswede and Neu Dachau. These artists were in general not seeking to imitate folk art styles; they sought instead the inspiration of what seemed a more elemental lifestyle. Thus Gauguin, speaking of his “Vision after the Sermon,” said, ““I believe I have achieved a great rustic superstitious simplicity in these figures.” [10] Gauguin proudly declared his satisfaction with a village where, as he said, “I live like a peasant and am known as a savage.” [11]
     But the fact was that Brittany had already become a favored spot for British and American second homes as well as for the occasional artist, and it soon seemed too civilized for Gauguin. He traveled to Tahiti and then to the Marquesas. Among the artists who sought in their travels a first-hand look at “the primitive” were Matisse, who spent time in Algeria and Morocco, Kokoschka in Tunisia, Pechstein who followed Gauguin to Tahiti, and Nolde who visited the Far East and New Guinea. Meanwhile they and others looked with a new eye during their visits to museum collections such as those at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro which attracted the attention of Picasso and others. [12] Further, by 1905 Matisse, Vlaminck, and Derain had all purchased African art for their own collections. [13]
     Artists of the Blaue Reiter group protested “the contemptuous gesture with which connoisseurs and artists have to this day banished all artistic forms of primitive cultures to the fields of ethnology or applied art is amazing at the very least” [14] Marc, Burliuk, and others labeled themselves “savages,” (just as slightly earlier artists had been called les fauves) [15] while in Russia Shevchenko called Neoprimitivism “a profoundly national phenomenon.” [16]
     For the Surrealists Freud’s concept of the unconscious placed a sort of primitive realm within every person’s psyche, reachable by dreams, by art, and by chance operations, but which are as well immediately available in the primitive. There they thought they might find “manifestations of uninhibited desire” and techniques to further “the integration of the sacred in their everyday world.” [17] Breton even operated a shop Gradiva which sold non-European art as did Éluard on a smaller scale. Michel Leiris participated in the Mission Dakar-Djibouti that brought thousands of objects from Africa to France. Max Ernst created a myth of his own shamanic rebirth as “a magician” “seeking to find the myth of his time.” [18] Their attitude was reflected in a map of “the world in the time of the Surrealists” in which Europe is insignificant and Oceania both central and immense. [19] Many classic Surrealist techniques such as invention of automatic writing, trance, and the invention of myth and ritual were considered to mirror practices of primitive cultures.
     In spite of this profound and consistent interest in primitive art among generations of moderns, actual stylistic borrowing is rare indeed. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century artists rebelled against the illusionist realism of academic painting by stressing the flat and decorative surfaces they perceived in Japanese woodcuts and Oceanic ornamentation in what Dujardin called Cloisonnism. The schematic planes of some African masks clearly encouraged Cubist portraiture. Yet even these cases cause and effect is very difficult to demonstrate convincingly. According to Robert Goldwater’s pioneering study Primitivism in Modern Art (1938), artists used the primitive precedent to ratify or reinforce what they were already doing. [20] The groundbreaking Negro Art Exhibition at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery curated by Marius de Zayas was designed to open viewers to modern art rather than to educate them about Africa. In the pamphlet he wrote for the exhibit de Zayas says, “Negro art has reawakened in us a sensibility weakened by education.” Though itself a “product of the ‘Land of Fright,’ created by a mentality full of fear and completely devoid of the faculties of observation and analysis,” African art resembles the most modern in that it is “intensely expressive” rather than “natural.” [21]
     Primitivism in poetry proves an instructive parallel to that in visual art. Occurring later, due doubtless to the lag in the availability of oral texts in comparison with sculpture from the same regions, the valorization of the primitive by writers once begun went hand in hand with that by painters. After a vogue for the archaic in the Romantic era that produced such faux semi-primitives as Macpherson’s Ossian and Chatterton’s Rowley, [22] the interest in foundational national epics led to Lönnrot stitching together the Kalevala and Longfellow’s composition of Hiawatha. In Une Saison en Enfer Rimbaud had declared as a battle-cry, “The pagan blood returns!” [23] shortly before he departed for the African bush. D. H. Lawrence’s infatuation with Mexico and ancient Etruria and his fierce critique of modern society was informed by his familiarity with Tylor and Frazer.
     The Dadaists celebrated the primitive as part of their drive to overturn all received ideas. Weimar Dadaist Hannah Höch showed her own work, including African-style masks, under the title “From an Ethnographic Museum.” Huelsenbeck invented his own “Negro words” (“’Umba, umba,’ which I roared and spouted over and over again to the audience” [24] is a fair example) and Tzara collected African and Oceanic art and wrote what he called Negro Poems. [25] They performed “les chants nègres” with music, sounds, and dancing of their own invention. Tzara said “My other brother is naïve and good, and laughs. He eats in Africa or along the South Sea Islands . . . Art, in the infancy of time, was prayer. Wood or stone were truth.” [26]
     In the early twentieth century translations of Far Eastern poetry by Pound, Waley, and others had an impact on Imagism comparable to that of African sculpture on Cubism. The best-known Asian poetic traditions are, of course, highly sophisticated. After such individual adventures as Artaud’s visit to the Tarahumara peyotists in Mexico and Paul Bowles’ transcription of the stories of illiterate Moroccans, the quest for primitive poetry led to Jerome Rothenburg’s best-selling Technicians of the Sacred in 1968 to be followed by other anthologies, and then his founding of the journal Alcheringa with Dennis Tedlock two years later.
     Though Tedlock is an academic anthropologist, he is also an initiated shaman among Highland Mayan people (as is his wife Barbara) in Guatemala. Alcheringa published translations of oral texts as well as new poetry by poets such as Gary Snyder and Robert Kelly. Its first issue identified itself as “the first magazine of the world’s tribal poetries,” yet disclaimed scholarly goals, noting that “while its sources will be different from other poetry magazines, it will be aiming at the startling & revelatory presentation that has been common to our avant gardes.” In other words, the “primitives” are to read as though they were contemporary experimentalists despite the fact that the social role of all oral poets guarantees that they be highly conventional traditionalists.
     Rothenburg claimed for the primitive a mystical “sense-of-unity” he believes to have been “shattered” by modern minds. “Revolutionary & limit-smashing” poets are to him “forerunners” in the recovery of such a wholesome unified vision. [27] He lists six areas of common ground between the primitives and his own circle, including orality, “intermedia,” and the poet’s role as shaman. This bias leads to the presentation of texts and events first recorded by anthropologists in such a way to make them resemble happenings or performance art. With this refracting lens, a simple conversation in William R. Geddes’ Nine Dayak Nights in which the tribal people explain quite sensibly that they discard food waste from their stilt houses without carrying it to a dump area because their pigs eat it becomes a “Garbage Event” in which “the participants defend the ‘abandoned beauty’ and ‘town-quality’ of their environment” [28] though in fact the quoted terms are those of the European observer and not those of the natives at all. The primitives again provide an excuse for deviation from the norm and criticism of existing values. Other American poets participating in similar shamanistic ambitions include Michael McClure (whose growlings differ little from the pseudo-African cries of the Dadaists) or the feminist myth-making of Diane di Prima in Loba and Anne Waldman in The Iovis Trilogy.
     In the eighteenth century Schiller had regarded “naïve” poetry expressing a “primal unity of vision,” which the civilized, entangled in “artificial relations and situations” could only recall as an ideal. [29] The early twentieth century considered primitive art a model in that it was somehow absolute art, “non-referential,” or “self-contained,” in the words of Carl Einstein “oriented not toward the viewer, but in terms of themselves” [30] though in fact, anthropologists would say that in traditional societies art is far more closely integrated with other realms of people’s lives. According to Wilhelm Worringer all art had been at first abstract, though European art had deviated in its gradually tendency toward mimesis and illusionism. [31] Françoise Gilot recalled Picasso’s saying that what impressed him about African sculpture was that it was made for “a sacred purpose, a magic purpose.” [32] Surely it is no coincidence that the attempt to recover the artist’s vatic role, the search for the divine, for a truth truer than science arose in the wake of the nineteenth century death of god and the rejection of modern capitalist society went hand in hand with the rejection of rationality itself. Nietzsche’s deeply non-logical but creative will passed into the Freudian subconscious. Those who sought truth and beauty in the primitive often were little concerning with actual “primitives”; instead they were expressing a sort of faith in the metaphysical itself, imperiled by science, and asserting the central role of artists in accessing a deeper truth than that of everyday consciousness.
     Looking at the Huichol yarn painting on the wall of my study, or the Haitian wax figures from a Brooklyn botanica behind the glass in a barrister’s bookcase, or, indeed, the works my wife Patricia has brought home from schizophrenic patients and the paintings of my small grandchildren provides me not so much with information about the specific vision of the artists who created these objects as a constant reminder that an accurate concept of art cannot be constructed without the inclusion of such evidence. Art for most people in most times seems in many ways far closer to these “anthropological” artifacts than it is to the work of Raphael or to Marina Abramović, but art is universal because it is at its root an essential need of humanity. We require fetishes to make life livable just as the masked tribal dancer possessed by deity does. Often investigators have sought to recover the “artistic” value of what once was labeled primitive art; it is time to admit the “magical” value of work by contemporary and cosmopolitan minds. The biologists have long known that, since the appearance of our singular species and in every part of the world to which we have spread, our minds are all the same.



1. Of course, the term (as well as others like “savage,” and “barbaric”) is now considered impossibly ethnocentric and outmoded. In the first half of the twentieth century “primitive” was used unselfconsciously, including by Robert Goldwater for his seminal study Primitivism and Modern Art. I employ it here since my focus (like his) is the idea of the primitive; it is for anthropologists to analyze the actual cultures that were once given that label.

2. Metamorphoses, 1, 89 ff.

3. Among other significant pre-Romantics who revalued the primitive is Montaigne whose marvelous essay “On the Cannibals” declares “there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.” Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, Diderot’s Supplement au voyage de Bougainville and most particularly Vico’s New Science were particularly influential in the 18th century.

4. Often quoted, the remark first appeared in an interview in the New York Herald Tribune for May 21, 1893.

5. The trend continued as first ragtime and then jazz enjoyed enormous vogues in the early twentieth century. In the past fifty years that connoisseurs have discovered blues and other folk music including that from India and other parts of the world. Most would agree that West African music is, by way of American jazz, blues, and rock and roll, the most important component of popular music throughout the world today. Compare the prominent place of the music of the socially despised and poverty-stricken Roma in Europe.

6. Many commercially produced postcards of the era and indeed well into the twentieth century featured putatively North African or Arab models in partial or complete undress.

7. Such shows had been part of the Jardin d'acclimatation amusement park in the Bois de Boulogne since 1877. They became de rigeur thereafter in virtually all such exhibitions including Colonial Exhibitions in Marseilles (1906 and 1922) and in Paris (1907 and 1931). “Natives” were often caged and appeared nude or semi-nude. Since the 1874 introduction of Sami herdsmen to accompany a reindeer exhibit in Hamburg, indigenous people were increasingly featured in zoos. Such attractions were offered in fifteen European zoos by 1900 as well as in America. The trend lasted until 1936 when the last such exhibit was closed in Turin. Artists such as Kirchner and Heckel visited such shows. See Gill Perry, “Primitivism and the Modern,” in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993), 63.

8. Lévy-Bruhl’s book was translated into English as How Natives Think (1926). To Tylor all religion was a vestigial survival of primitive modes of thinking.

9. Quoted in Perry 8.

10. Quoted in Perry 18.

11. Quoted in Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art, (London: Thames on Hudson, 1994), 26.

12. Picasso’s visit in 1907 occurred 83 after he had painted Demoiselles d’Avignon. In 1928 Georges-Henri Rivière who had ties to the Surrealists became the director of the museum.

13. Perry 55.

14. August Macke, “Masks,” in The Blaue Reiter Almanac The Documents of 20th-Century Art, edited by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc documentary edition by Klaus Lankheit (NY: Viking Press, 1974), 88.

15. The Blaue Reiter Almanac, 61, 72, and elsewhere.

16. See Aleksandr Shevchenko’s Neo-primitivizm (1913). Shevchenko envisioned an art in which influences of Cézanne, Cubism and Futurism would mix with traditional Russian 'folk art' conventions.

17. Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (Routledge: London and New York, 2003), 59. It is telling that, while providing a wealth of historical and biographical data, Tythacott’s detailed study offers little in the way of specific borrowing.

18. Rhodes 174.

19. Published in a special issue of Varietés in 1929 along with writing by René Crevel, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, André Breton, and others. Africa is small. Alaska is huge as is Russia, though perhaps this fact owes more to Communism as to primitivism.

20. Joyce Henri Robinson in a review of Frances S. Connelly’s The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics 1725-1907 in Studies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. 4, No. 1, fall/winter 1999, p. 130 supports Goldwater’s contention that it is more a matter of an “attitude conducive to art” than specific borrowings.

21. Reprinted in Primitivism and Twentieth-century Art: A Documentary History, edited by Jack D. Flam and Miriam Deutch (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 2003).

22. Compare with Armand Schwerner’s imitation of Sumero-Akkadian texts in his Tablets (1974).

23. He had originally considered titling the book Livre païen or Livre nègre.

24. Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer (Berkeley: University of California, 1991),9. Huelsenbeck says then that Mynheer Ephraim, the landlord of the Cabaret Voltaire, an old sailor, objected that these were not Negro at all and taught Huelsenbeck what he said were authentic African and Oceanic chants.

25. Reprinted in a translation by Piette Joris, Alcheringa II,1 (Boston: 1976), pp. 76-114.

26. Reprinted in Vassiliki Kolotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou’s Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 281.

27. Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1969), xxii.

28. Rothenberg 108. Cf. W. R. Geddes, Nine Dayak Nights (London: Oxford UP, 1967), 19-20.

29. See Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.
30. See Carl Einstein, African Sculpture (1915).
31. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (1908).
32. Francoise Gilot and Carleton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 266.