Charles Henri Ford
1908-2002
Charles Henri Ford’s emergence onto the modernist literary scene began in 1929 when Ford started publishing the little magazine, Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms (1929-30). Ford gained more prominence in modernist publishing when he moved to New York and began to engage with modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. He subsequently moved to Paris, where he met Gertrude Stein and had an affair with Djuna Barnes. Upon his return to New York with his partner/lover Pavel Tchelitchew, he founded the Surrealist magazine View in 1940. Due to the confluence of his own Surrealist poetry and View (1940-1947), Ford became the leading American Surrealist voice in New York’s literary and art communities. Edward B. Germain claims that Ford was “America’s surrealist poet” and that he “creates the wonder, the wit, and the erotic beauty that have made surrealism the most significant of all modern influences upon poetry” (qtd. in Howard 9). While Ford’s literary work has received far less critical attention than that of his modernist peers and collaborators, one of Ford’s most important contributions to the field of modernism was the novel that he co-wrote with Parker Tyler,…
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