Woodson2

1.

      A. R. Orage does not
figure very much in American literary history. Orage is
entirely absent from Terrible Honesty: Mongrel
Manhattan in the 1920’s, Ann Douglas’s
“biography” of New York in the 1920s. I have had to
supply the cognomen Oragean Modernism to fill
the void left by the present framing of American
literature. In New York in the 1920s and 1930s Orage
directed creative writing seminars that included many
important and influential figures of that time and
place—in many cases they were figures not associated
with Orage or with occultism. What came out of those
seminars was a literary movement on a par with the
recognized movements of the times—imagism, dada,
futurism—a movement that produced a host of literary
work of high achievement, some canonical. In the absence
of any recognition of the existence of Oragean
Modernism many of its texts are poorly understood
by literary scholars, for example, Agee’s Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men and Barnes’s Nightwood.
Other texts that belong to the movement seem the
products of isolated and marginal writers who seem
eccentric or difficult, such as Dawn Powell, Ralph
Ellison, Carl Van Vechten,—and Melvin B. Tolson. Largely
because of the theory-driven crises that have enveloped
literary studies and turned it away from literature to
culture, politics, and “philosophy” for the last sixty
years, there has been little opportunity to address
texts in ways that make them understood merely as
literary works, so that many flawed studies that are
crippled by unacknowledged orthodoxies have been
presented as being definitive, when in reality they are
hallucinations.

2.

     What record do we have of
the school of the Oragean Modernists? They
kept their existence and their activities to themselves;
they were occultists in the most literal sense—hidden,
though not as they may have been assumed to conduct
their concealment. Now this is interesting: in Europe
Gurdjieff and his adherents operated pretty much in the
open. The Orageans in New York (and later across the
United States as the members dispersed) operated in
privacy—their word for it. I attribute this to the
difference that the Orageans actually believed that they
could be effective in changing the world as they saw
fit, while this was not a part of the activities of the
schools directly studying with Gurdjieff, where the
students were not allowed a high opinion of themselves,
where the students were not allowed to write.
As Gorham Munson puts it—”[Orage] initiated a movement
for supermen” (“Orage in America”), and we must infer
that supermen do not do their deeds in the open.

     The Oragean Modernists
did not leave behind any manifesto identified publicly
as such, and though there is somewhere what I like to
think of as the ur-text of Oragean Modernism, I do not
know what it is: I suspect it is one of the many novels
that Carl Van Vechten wrote, novels that are now
overlooked or dismissed by literary scholars. There are
many records of Orage’s teachings, which are important
because they expose the contents of the Oragean
Modernists texts: the most authoritative account of the
teachings is C. Daly King’s:

King, C. Daly The
Oragean Version. Privately printed in a limited
edition of 100 copies. New York: 1951, 289 p., index.

Convinced that Orage’s presentation was an
undistorted version of an ancient teaching that would
be irretrievably lost after his death, King presents a
rigorous and detailed formulation of material he
gathered over several years of close study with Orage.
Pages 257 to 269 contain 118 aphorisms by Orage.
(Driscoll “Bibliography”)

But we do have the large body of literary work that was
produced out of the Oragean Modernist aesthetic. One of
the most important attributes of the textuality of Oragean
Modernism is a feature that seems completely
absurd: the repetition of names, the chief name being Orage
itself. The first twelve lines of Tolson’s epic poem, Harlem
Gallery, is a good example of the phonetic
ciphering of A.R. Orage:

The Harlem Gallery, an Afric pepper bird,

awakes me at a people’s dusk of dawn.

The age altars its image, a dog’s hind leg,

and hazards the moment of truth in pawn.

The Lord of the House of Flies,

jaundice-eyed, synapses purled,

wires before the tumultuous canvas,

The Second of May–

by Goya:

the dagger of Madrid

vs.

the scimitar of Murat.

               (“Alpha”)

The same type of writing can be found throughout the texts
of the Oragean Modernist group. We simply do not read this
way—we look at the words, we do not look and listen inside
the words. In the second canto of Harlem Gallery
Tolson warns that we are inadequate readers:

“Great minds require of us a reading glass;

great souls, a hearing aid.”

               (“Beta”)

     In fact to see Orage
in the twelve lines quoted above is the opposite of the
meaning of reading: but if a text asks us to
read it and instead we interpret the text,
then we are operating with the wrong set of rules.
Though we do not know it, the text that we are
interpreting is nonsense to us, and what we say about it
is nonsense. Scholar Wilburn Williams, Jr. —who wrote an
influential dissertation on Tolson— never progressed
beyond the acquisition of Tolson’s nonsense, but he was
not deterred by the nonsense either, so that he produced
the doctoral dissertation, The Desolate Servitude
of Language (1979), which maintains that Tolson
was inadequate to the demands of high modernism, so he
produced a shambling, futile imitation of the work of
Pound and Eliot.

     The Williams thesis is
derived from the assumption that Tolson set out alone to
best the high Modernists, Pound, Eliot, Joyce and the
rest: “Tolson had great anxieties about his debt to
Eliot and Pound because politically they were anathema
to him” (Williams 8). Trapped by his own absurd decision
to offer this reductive reading as scholarship, Williams
also maintained that Harlem Gallery is a great
poem: “Harlem Gallery is one of the great works
of our time” (Williams iv). Things have gone so far into
a retreat from reading and a wandering in the wasteland
of interpretation through theory that in Fettered
Genius: the African American bardic poet from slavery
to civil rights Keith D. Leonard presents a long
analysis of Melvin B. Tolson’s major writings supported
by the adherents of the nonsense readers of Tolson,
Wilburn Williams, Jr., Michael Bérubé, and
Aldon Nielsen. Since under the poststructuralist regime
there are no meanings, Leonard is liberated from the
problem of having to make any sense of Tolson, he can
ignore what is on the page and decide that it means
anything he would like it to mean: it is literary
criticism by way of Humpty Dumpty.

     Leonard has no idea that
his reading is yet further nonsense based on nonsense.
Here is Cherly Wall’s summation of Leonard’s treatment
of Tolson:

Fettered Genius avers that Melvin
Tolson conceives of a comparable journey, but in epic
rather than individual terms. It draws on Brent
Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora to provide
a framework for this analysis. If Brooks honors
existential sovereignty in the kitchenettes of Chicago’s
Southside, Tolson suggests how the “African American
diasporic mind” constitutes the greatest resistance to
imperial power and its legacy. Employing high modernist
poetics, Tolson escapes the fetters of national
boundaries in The Libretto for the Republic of
Liberia. The dense and difficult music of the
African diaspora offers prophetic possibilities. Harlem
Gallery meditates on those possibilities within
the context of art. The complexity of its subject
compels the complexity of its form. (Wall, “Keith
Leonard”)

     Tolson’s mastery is not
brought about by resistance and diaspora but by virtue
of being an initiate of art as he implies in Harlem
Gallery—and though he means alchemy when he says
art, he also means Modern poetry. Everyone from Williams
to Leonard assumes that Tolson is an outsider, though
Tolson has always maintained that he was an insider. And
he was an insider. It was Orage who had published Eliot
and Pound in his journal New Age: Louise Welch
records that “The brilliant editor of the New Age,
[was] regarded by T. S. Eliot as London’s best literary
critic of his time” (“A.R Orage”). And with direct
access to and mentorship from Orage and the Oragean
group, Tolson was by no means in the relationship to the
Modernists that the Williams-Bérubé wing
of Tolson scholarship assumes. Tolson belonged to a
group of supermen who were planning to create an
“objective” work of art that would redirect the history
of the entire planet. These plans are described in
King’s collection of Orage’s teaching and in other
places. Such goings-on are far beyond what have been
assumed to have been the concerns of these figures, but
that is why the central tenet of the Orageans is that
men are asleep. Tolson’s Harlem Gallery is
filled with distractions and dead ends. Such a one is
the passage on sleep in Harlem Gallery where
Tolson parodies Pound’s “The age demanded an image”
(“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” 198), but the topic under
discussion is neither Time nor modern literature, it is
alchemical theory—spiritual alchemy:

The age,

taut as the neck of a man on a gallows tree,

demands

a Friar Bacon who will cast

a head of brass

to clarion, “Time is,

Time was, Time is past,”

before the graven image topples,

breaks in pieces,

while the necromancer snuggles deep

between the breasts

and in the arms

of the courtesan Sleep.

               (“Omicron”)

Friar Bacon was an alchemist. The man on the gallows
alludes to a Tarot card, The Hanged Man, the 12th
Arcana, and one meaning of that card is the Great
Work—the perfection of the will of man. Tolson’s poem is
best understood as an alchemical text, and it alludes to
several such texts in its more that 4,000 lines. The
rules by which it is to be read are the rules for
reading an alchemical text. But in the lines above
Tolson specifically addresses the material on pages
227-28 of the Oragean Version where King
points out a technical mistake in the teachings of the
Ouspenskian Version. I will only quote enough to give
the sense that such a disagreement existed and that it
was debated on the grounds of alchemy, for the
passage continues with a long quotation from Ouspensky:

Now this is an extremely serious point and it
ought to be discussed in the light of Ouspensky’s own
words in regard to it. In his book, In Search of
the Miraculous, on page 193 he speaks of the
required transformation of that hydrogen in man’s body
which is here identified as the hydrogen, “mi 12,” and
of the allusions allegorically made to this
transformation by the alchemists. (Oragean Version
227-28)

In the above lines from Harlem Gallery Tolson is
at great pains to indicate that it is Ouspensky (the
necromancer) who is asleep—and the carefully tuned ear can
hear and see the name, Ouspensky, in the lines—”ass pp en
c/k ee.”

3.

     Williams proclaimed with
no lack of authority that “Tolson was both a late-comer
and a loner” (Desolate ii). So much for Oragean
Modernism—there is no understanding of Tolson as having
any affiliations. In Harlem Gallery Tolson
places himself solidly in a school:

The school of the artist

is

the circle of wild horses,

heads centered,

as they present to the wolves

a battery of heels,

in the arctic barrens where

no magic grass of Blaucus

gives immortality.

               (“Omicron”)

Wolves is used because of lv—lamed
vau, the thirty-six zaddikim. Tolson not only belonged to
a school, the Oragean Modernists—his school claimed to be
the tzadikim:

The Lamed-Vav Tzaddikim are also
called the Nistarim (“concealed ones”). In our
folk tales, they emerge from their self-imposed
concealment and, by the mystic powers, which they
possess, they succeed in averting the threatened
disasters of a people persecuted by the enemies that
surround them. They return to their anonymity as soon as
their task is accomplished, ‘concealing’ themselves once
again in a Jewish community wherein they are relatively
unknown. The lamed-vavniks, scattered as they
are throughout the Diaspora, have no acquaintance with
one another. On very rare occasions, one of them is
‘discovered’ by accident, in which case the secret of
their identity must not be disclosed. The lamed-vavniks
do not themselves know that they are ones of the 36. In
fact, tradition has it that should a person claim to be
one of the 36, that is proof positive that they are
certainly not one. Since the 36 are each exemplars of anavah
(“humility”), having such a virtue would preclude
against one’s self-proclamation of being among the
special righteous. The 36 are simply too humble to
believe that they are one of the 36. (Zwerin “The 36”)

And you can hear A.R. Orage all through the lines. Then
there is the meaning: wild horses in the arctic? Horses
set upon by wolves in the arctic? There is every
suggestion that we have before us another lawful
inexactitude. Speaking of esoteric writing John Henderson
states that “Legominism (esoteric passages) contains
lawful inexactitudes, anomalies and absurdities, which
serve as flags to mark a place of interest, letting us
know that something more than meets the eye is buried
nearby” (Hidden 119).

     The esoteric school to
which Tolson belonged was more than a literary movement,
but it can only be tracked through the literary texts
that its writers produced. Many of those texts present
capsule views of the school, namely Van Vechten’s Firecrackers
and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Tolson is a
character in both Zora Neal Hurston’s Seraph on the
Suwanee and Ellison’s Invsible Man.
Lawrence Jackson’s new history of African American
literature in the 1930s puts Tolson and Ellison together
in 1931. A photograph of the Festival of Negro Poets in
October 1952 in Jackson, Mississippi, shows Tolson
standing behind Hurston: also in the photograph is
fellow-Gurdjieffian Arna Bontemps (Farnsworth 204). Here
is the Hurston text color-coded to show Tolson’s name
and the name of the college where Tolson taught at the
time of Hurston’s writing of the novel. Note that the
action that takes place in the text recapitulates the
content of the words:

Melvin  Beau norus Tolson

Looking over Jim’s shoulder through the glass of the

housing, Arvay made out the dim shape of a boat

coming
to meet
them.
The sun
was not up yet, and

the boat
was a dark mass against
the grayness
of the

mist.
The approaching vessel cut a white pompadour

with its bow
as it came ahead. When its bow was

abreast
of the bow
of the Arvay Henson, the captain, a

chestnut-colored
Negro, stepped
out of his pilot–

house
and stood on deck looking over at the Arvay

Henson. Jim left his wheel at once and
stepped
on

deck.
The two boats were probably fifty feet apart.

Jim made
some
mysterious motions with
his hands,

and the captain of the other boat doubled his two

black fists, and struck one on top of the other
rapidly

several times. They smiled and waved at each other,

and both
went back to their wheels.

Wiley

Jim left his wheel
at once and stepped on deck. The

two boats were probably fifty feet apart. Jim made

some mysterious motions with his hands, and the

captain of the other boat doubled his two black
fists,

and struck one on top of the other rapidly several

times. They smiled
and waved
at each other, and both

went
back to their wheels.

     In Invisible Man
Tolson is the Vet who talks to the protagonist in the
Golden Day whore house. The passage contains numerous
clues that point to Tolson, though there is one anomaly.
Invisible Man is a roman a cléf, and
most of the characters are described so accurately that
they can be easily identified once the reader has caught
on to what Ellison is doing. But Tolson is described as
being fat, and he was not a fat man, so this portrait is
another “lawful inexactitude: “fat man” points to the
mi-fa interval, which is a technical point in the Work
that has to do with how control is exercised by esoteric
adepts; at a certain stage in any process an outside
force is required for the continuation of the process,
and the adept not only knows this doctrine but knows how
to apply it to any process—particularly to human
development. In his Libretto Tolson refers to
this doctrine in the “Fa” canto as “the interlude of
peace.” Since the Vet [Tolson] realizes that Mr. Norton
has received “a shock” Ellison has incorporated
Gurdjiefian terminology into that episode: presumably
Ellison is telling us that it was Tolson’s particular
assignment to provide shocks, though beyond his role in
the classroom, we have to idea what that might have
been. As David Gold demonstrates, Tolson was very direct
in his use of the term shock in connection with
education:

David Gold. “Nothing Educates Us Like
a Shock”: The Integrated Rhetoric of Melvin B. Tolson.

Gold, David. “‘Nothing Educates Us Like a Shock’:
The Integrated Rhetoric of Melvin B. Tolson.” CCC.
55.2 (2003): 226-253.

Abstract:

This essay examines the pedagogical practices of the
poet, civil rights activist, and teacher Melvin B.
Tolson who taught at Wiley College from 1923 to 1947.
Tolson’s complex classroom style, which mixed elements
of classical, African American, and
current-traditional rhetoric, produced a pedagogy that
was at once conservative, progressive, and radical,
inspiring his students to academic achievement and
social action. Tolson demonstrates that it is possible
to instruct students in the norms of the academy
without sacrificing their home voices or identities.

     Alan Nadel gives this
summary of the action in the Golden Day episode in Invisible
Man: “The fat vet, who had been a surgeon, helps
the invisible man to bring Norton upstairs and explains
that Norton has had a mild shock” (100). Nevertheless,
Ellison makes it clear that he is presenting Tolson,
because he renders Tolson’s name in such a way that
there can be little doubt: the protagonist asks the Vet
why he returned after the war, and the Vet
answers—”Nostalgia” (92). Now we are dealing with cabala
here, the phonetic code of the alchemists that asks us
to read in a different way than is normal—but there are
rules. We work in both directions, and we work
phonetically, so just as in the Hurston example above us
is also ouse, ass, ess, and es,
we can read tal as tol—and
obviously nos is son
in reverse. Tolson confirms this way of reading all
through Harlem Gallery:

Dipping in every direction like a quaquaversal,

the M. C. guffaws: “Hideho, that swig would make

a squirrel spit in the eye of a bulldog!”

               (“Xi”
82, lns. 1695-97)

and

contrived the helmet-like head of the Cape

buffalo with its diablerie

curved outward, downward, and backward–

then, forward, upward, and inward:

               (“Omega”
168, lns. 4040-43)

     (Harlem Gallery
does not give up its meaning until the patterns in the
poem have been established. Since Tolson’s critics
refuse to spend the time to see what the patterns are,
they cannot read the poem.) So, we see that Tolson was
by no means a late-comer and a loner; he was a member of
an invisible esoteric school—he was an invisible man—and
it is the critics who are on the outs. I will mention in
passing that we now have to take account of an
alternative connotation for the title of Ellison’s
novel, for now it recapitulates the idea of an
“invisible college” as mentioned in German Rosicrucian
pamphlets in the early 17th century. Throughout his
novel Ellison refers to the Gurdjieffians as a school,
or should I say that when Ellison uses the word school,
he is referring to the Gurdjieffians.

4.

     Robert Farnsworth states
that [Woodson’s] “statements about Tolson’s beliefs are
contradicted by much biographical evidence…. To see him
as a student of the esoteric Christianity of Gurdjieff,
à la Jean Toomer does not fit the known facts of
his life. As late as 1961, writing to the former student
Benjamin Bell and his wife,…he whimsically lamented, “I
guess I’m the only Marxist poet Here and Now…. In my
view Woodson’s interpretation is oversubtle and makes it
appear more cynical and pessimistic than in fact he was”
(175). According to Farnsworth, Tolson “believed that
man was working his way toward a universal culture in
which we would be freer than ever before to realize his
human potential” (175). Farnsworth’s dismissal of my 330
page study of Tolson (A Critical analysis of the
Poetry of Melvin B. Tolson [1978]) doesn’t seem
to me to offer any “biographical evidence” to refute my
arguments about the sources of Tolson’s ideas and
poetry. He offers one “whimsical” comment from a
personal letter. But what does Tolson say in this
letter? He says that he is in 1961 the only Marxist
poet. At that time fully one half of the human race was
living under the various Communist governments of the
Soviet Union, Peoples Republic of China, East Germany,
Tanzania, Egypt, South Yemen, Syria, Iraq, North
Vietnam, Cuban, North Korean, etc.—and I can’t think of
a more absurd statement that anyone could take as
evidence of anything. Where was Tolson’s solidarity with
the poets of the East German Academy of Arts for
instance? —Wolf Biermann, Volker Braun, Bernd Jentzsch,
Sarah Kirsch, and Karl Mickel—poets of folksy
language. How can anyone imagine that Tolson
actually was the only Marxist poet? Did Tolson seriously
think this? If he did, he was so wrong that we ought not
to be listening to anything he says, we should hope he
can get some psychological help. And how does anything admitted
to be whimsy serve as evidence? What part is the
whimsy—the part about being a Marxist? But more telling,
is that there are Marxist-Communist aesthetics
(social/socialist realism) and they differ immensely
from Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia,
the poem that Farnsworth brings in as one of Tolson’s
Marxist poems—though Farnsworth never does actually show
how the Libretto is specifically Marxist.
The thousands of Marxist poets writing in 1961 never
produced anything like Tolson’s Libretto,
because you can’t write with that level of allusive and
linguistic complexity and call yourself a Marxist: and
if you did that wouldn’t anyone object?

     Recently, my dissertation
on Tolson has served as the core of a study of the use
of classical literature by Tolson. In African
American Writers and Classical Tradition (2010),
William W. Cook and James Tatum present a thorough,
balanced, and informed view of Tolson; here is part of
Cook and Tatum’s discussion of the concluding section of
Tolson’s Libretto.

“Do”

And what a conclusion it is. At first reading, the
first of the three sections of this ode seems
gibberish. It is by far the most deliberately
difficult part of the Libretto, as we have seen a
polyglot collage of references and quotations of
arcane information from all kinds of sources jammed
together into eleven long-lined sestets that not even
Tolson’s most assiduous critics can yet fully explain.
As Woodson observes, however, this excessive
difficulty is itself neither unconscious nor without
design; the first part of the final ode (lines
489-554) is difficult precisely because Tolson wants
to deflect all but the most dedicated readers. He
follows the same strategy as the equally obscure
verses of “The Man from Halicarnassus.” What does it
mean then to become an initiate in this final ode?

     In the interest of
brevity for this short run, the ultimate answer may
lurk in the tarot and our decoding of it, as Woodson
suggests. But Tolson’s whole aim is to lose the reader
in a maze of allusions and references, not least in
the notes that purport to explain or otherwise answer
questions we might have. What predominates above all
else in the eleven strophes is the imagery and even
the sounds of Dante’s Inferno. The
concluding ode that will lead the Libretto‘s
audiences as well as the Republic of Liberia onto the
highest ground begins at the lowest point imaginable
in Western and particularly Christian imagination, the
infernal landscape of the bottom of hell, where every
orifice but the mouth becomes the main instrument of
communication, the vagina as well as the anus. The
language comes from drought-stricken Brazil and a
Japanese officer’s diary in Norman Mailer’s The
Naked and the Dead.

a pelaygeya in as seccas
the old she-fox today

eyes dead letters mouth a hole in a privy

     tascbunt a
corpse’s in a mud-walled troy of jaguncos

(naze naze desu ha servant de dakar) (el
grito dc yara)

     cackles among the
garbage cans of mummy truths

     o frontier saints bring
out your dead.

The old she-fox’s language is language stretched to the
breaking point, as Williams observes, and her infernal
language is itself inspired by that of Plutus in Dante’s
Inferno. She echoes both the famous gateway to
hell (“per me si va nella citti dolente,” 500) as well
as Plutus’s meaningless cry “aleppe” (554), and
throughout her section Tolson drops all punctuation and
capitalization. The appearance of gibberish is, as
Williams also observes, actually an elegant illusion
that Tolson creates to beguile the incurious, the lazy,
or anyone else who is not willing to invest the labor in
rising to his poem’s challenge. The appearance of lack
of control is simply that, an appearance. What Tolson
creates is an infernalization à la Dante of the
attempt to communicate final coherence and meaning. This
apocalyptic ending awaits anyone who would bestow
something like Pindar’s version of immortality on his
patrons and their victorious athletes, and it will
always recur just like the infernal language of Dante’s
hell. Unlike Dante, or for that matter Eliot,
Tolson has no salvation to offer that would lift
either humanity or Liberia out of this endlessly
recurring cycle. (Cook 246-47; emphasis added)

     Tolson’s Libretto
is about something: it is as Cook and Tatum state, about
the cycles of history and it shows how the
superman must rise above the fluctuations of historical
cycles to survive. This cannot be obliterated by
deciding that Tolson is a cheerful person, a yea-sayer
and that he is so daft as to look to a golden age when
he can see across 5,000 years of human history and draw
his own conclusions: what Marxist bases his poem on
Oswald Spengler, for that matter?

5.

     I mentioned the crisis
that allowed for the abandonment of reading literature
as literature. And I am trying to show that Ellison and
Tolson were esotericists. If there is any wonder at why
this has not previously been established, all that is
needed is to wonder instead at this excerpt from a
description of Alan Nadel’s book on Ellison from the
University of Iowa Press website:

Modeling his argument on Foucault’s analysis
of the asylum, Nadel analyzes the institution of the
South to show how it moved blacks from “enslavement” to
“slavery” to “invisibility”—all in the interest of
maintaining an organization of power based on racial
caste. He then demonstrates the ways Ellison wrote in
the modernist/surreal tradition to trace symbolically
the history of blacks in America as they moved not only
from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, and from
the rural South to the urban North, but as they moved
(sometimes unnoticed) through American fiction.

Cook, William W.
& Tatum, James, African American Writers and
Classical Tradition Chicago, IL: U P

               Chicago,
2010.

Driscoll, J. Walter. A. R. Orage: An
Introduction & Bibliography.

               http://www.gurdjieff-bibliography.com/Current/r_driscoll_%20orage-%20intro_2004-07-04.pdfy

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York
City: Random House Inc., 1995.

Farnsworth, Robert M. Melvin B.Tolson,
1898-1966: Plain Talk and Poetic Prophecy. U of
Missouri P, 1984.

Gold, David. “‘Nothing Educates Us Like a Shock’:
The Integrated Rhetoric of Melvin B. Tolson.” CCC.
55.2

               (2003):
226-253.

Jackson, Lawrence Patrick. The Indignant
Generation: A Narrative History of African American
Writers and

               Critics,
1934-1960. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2011.

Munson, Gorham. “Orage in America.”

               http://www.gurdjieff-bibliography.com/Current/q_munson_orage-in-amer_2_2004-07-04.pdf

Nadel, Alan. Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison
and the American Canon. Iowa city, IA:
University of Iowa Press,

               1991

Pound, Ezra. Personae: The Shorter Poems.
“Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.” Rev. edn, ed. Lea Baechler and
A Walton

               Litz.
New York: New Directions, 1990.183-225.

Tolson, Melvin B. Harlem Gallery. With an
introd. by Karl Shapiro. NY: Twayne [1965- ]

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