“Only the Dance is Sure”: Dance and Constructions of Gender in Modernist Poetry

This essay focuses on some of the central innovations in early 20th century dance in relation to their influence on Anglo-American modernist poetry. Arguing that dance is an important source of inspiration that shapes the imagery in many works of T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and W. B. Yeats, it is also tied to constructions of gender, which engage with modernist aesthetics and reflect the body politics of the late Victorian era. Striking is the complex use of dance as a metaphor which epitomizes the tension between abstractness – an androgynous “impersonality” – and physicality, i.e. a sexualized femininity or masculinity. Noticeable is an ambivalent split between celebrating the body and de-humanizing it, between affirming its sensuality and an emerging spiritual ideal. Whereas this is most obvious in Eliot’s and Yeats’s poetry, Crane and Williams illustrate the search for an “authentic” form of expression, a new freedom and realism which is also represented in a more dynamic, rhythmical language. Although the poets differ in their symbolic use of and attitude towards dance, they bear literary testimony to its power and portray it in joyful, celebratory, erotic, or more spiritual, agonized tones.