Some Versions of the Cold War

Cold War Poetry . By Edward Brunner. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2001. xxi, 300 pp. $29.95.

The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs . By John Lardas. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2001. x, 316 pp. $39.95.

"Strange Prophecies Anew": Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg . By Tony Trigilio. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press. 2000. 209 pp. $37.50.

In Cold Fear: "The Catcher in the Rye," Censorship Controversies, and Postwar American Character . By Pamela Hunt Steinle. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press. 2000. x, 238 pp. $45.00.

The specter that, a century earlier, Marx and Engels had described as stalking the continent of Europe was extending itself to the United States, looming over a nation that had prided itself on its historical immunity to the apocalyptic tragedies of either/or.

—Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War

How did the Cold War influence the production and consumption of culture in the United States? "Unable to strike directly at the Russians, the most vigilant patriots went after the scalps of their countrymen instead"—this is how Stephen Whitfield characterizes the cultural effects of the Cold War, and most literary responses likewise configure it as a shameful period in American history.¹ Some pundits have said that Cold War thinking has made a comeback since the attacks of September 11, but four recent studies of postwar American literature suggest that the American Cold War never really ended.²

Perhaps it is best to distinguish the Cold War proper (1947–60, with the Cuban missile crisis as the shift into a "hot" conflict) from the Long Cold War (the less specific cultural struggle that may have come into sharpest focus during the Cold War, even if the Long Cold War is merely the polarized, dualistic vision produced by Cold War intellectuals and projected onto the larger screen of human history).³ One text under review here, Tony Trigilio's "Strange Prophecies Anew": Reading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg, describes a tradition of cultural resistance that reaches back from Allen Ginsberg to H.D. and William Blake, but all the texts under discussion revisit post–World War II American literature in order to resist the Cold War divisions they describe. If we borrow this technique for rationalizing periodization from British literature scholars, who refer to the Long Eighteenth Century so as to hang on to Jane Austen, then we are better equipped to make sense of recent literary histories of the Cold War period, all of which are actually interventions within the Long Cold War.

Edward Brunner's Cold War Poetry is entirely concerned with poetry produced in (and in a sense by) the Cold War; but in its demand for a reconsideration of 1950s poetry that foregrounds the social text that shaped both the composition and reception of the poems, Brunner's text should also be understood as a participant in the Long Cold War. For Brunner, poets of the 1950s had to choose between "going underground" (meaning they might have to publish with small presses such as City Lights and forego positive reviews in the most illustrious journals) or steering a very tricky course to survive in the literary mainstream. His always nuanced account takes us beyond the cliché in which academic poets in bow ties arrived at work early "to type Petrarchan sonnets to Eisenhower," a cliché, Brunner concedes, that "no one believes" (10) but that continues to stand in place of our knowledge about what the literary mainstream was doing while mavericks like Ginsberg and Ashbery were defining themselves against the center. Brunner begins by dividing mainstream poets (Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, Karl Shapiro, and Randall Jarrell are common examples) from poets who "went underground" because they could not agree to the implicit demands of Cold War life and literature: "Only poets who had been driven underground were capable of producing interesting work" (ix). This blunt opening statement and others...