Notes
1] Robert McAlmon was owner of Contact Publishing, which brought out Hemingway's Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923; Audre Hanneman, Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967]: 5); and Bird was William Bird, whose Three Mountains Press brought out In our Time in 1924 (Hanneman, 6).
5] yence: have sex with.
14] Bill: Gerogiannis identifies him as Hemingway's friendin Chicago, Bill Smith (144).
25] Menken: Gerogiannis identifies him as the reformer S. Stanwood Menken (144) but Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), the American journalist and critic, co-editor of The Smart Set1914-1923, and publisher of iconoclastic writers, may also have been intended because Hemingway "ironically dedicated The Torrents of Spring to both of these men `in admiration'" (144).
26] Waldo Frank: Waldo David Frank (1889-1967), American Jewish critic and popular novelist, whose early works include Virgin Spain (1926; which Hemingway panned in Death in the Afternoon), The Unwelcome Man (1917), about an unloved child, Rahab (1922), about a religious woman's fall into prostitution, and City Block (1922), about race relations in the southern United States.
27] The Broom: possibly The Broom, an international magazine of the arts edited by Harold A. Loeb and published in Rome Nov. 1921-Jan. 1924 (AP 4. B766 Robarts Library; L-10/166 Fisher Rare Book Library).
28] Dada: orderless, nihilistic movement in art and literature founded in Zurich about 1916 and associated with Tristan Tzara.
29] Dempsey: Jack Dempsey, American boxer in the 1920s, former world heavyweight champion.
31] Ezra: Ezra Pound, expatriot American poet.
45] The Dial: a literary journal, 86 numbers, Chicago 1881-1918, and New York, 1918-July 1929. It published T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" first in America, a special issue on Proust after his death in 1922, and relatively little by or on Pound. See AP 2 D48 Robarts Library.
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: Complete Poems, ed. Nicholas Gerogiannis, rev. edn. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992): 70. PS 3515 E37A17 1992 Robarts Library.
First publication date:
1924
Publication date note: Part I, Querschnitt 4.iv (Autumn 1924): 229-30. Cf. Parts II-V, Querschnitt 4.v (November 1924): 278.
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 1999.
Recent editing: 2:2002/4/18
Composition date:
1923
Composition date note: in Paris (Complete Poems, ed. Nicholas Gerogiannis, rev. edn. [1992]: 71)
Rhyme: irregular