The Colonial Moment: Discoveries and Settlements in Modern American Poetry (review)

In The Colonial Moment, Jeffrey W. Westover argues that American modernist poets who do not expatriate confront the colonized and colonizing history of the United States in their poetry. More specifically, Westover sees the repeated return of Hart Crane, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams to inaugural moments and myths of American history in their poems as reflecting early twentieth-century conflict between the nation's colonial history and its growing status as an imperial world power. While, as he puts it, "the poetry I consider puts the emphasis more on the colonial heritage and the neocolonial expansions of the United States than on its postcolonial status," the poets he discusses both "inherited" and "remade the mythology of discovery and colonization as a cultural paradigm in their era" (4, 5).

Westover grounds his discussion both in Benedict Anderson's and Homi Bhabha's conceptualizations of the nation and in the historical terms of Waldo Frank's influential cultural study of 1919, Our America. According to Westover, Frank presents the problem of "our America" as one of linguistic deficiency, or lack of articulate self-disclosure: "America" is in cultural crisis, a "turmoiled giant" dumb because "consciousness within America has not yet reached that pitch where the voice bursts forth" (Frank, quoted 11). National self-disclosure can be accomplished only through this bursting forth of language, but the vernacular—as Frank saw it—was dominated by European models and the world of commerce, hence inadequate to the task. Implying a coincidence of opinion if not Frank's outright influence on contemporary poets, Westover argues that poets seeking to express a meaningful concept of the nation did so performatively, through self-conscious and sometimes contradictory negotiations of history, identity, and form: "They view[ed] their poetic projects (their "making" of America in the representative domain of language) as unsettled and unsettling, open-ended and ongoing, and yet they also [saw] the poem as the fixed object of their desire, the solid embodiment of their achievement" (11). Not merely a matter of intellectual or political interest, Westover argues, this mapping or making of America in language in effect drives the projects of the poets he studies; moreover, these individual poets' poems offer "a collective remedy" to the problem of national expression Waldo Frank identifies (11). Because each working chapter of The Colonial Moment focuses on a single poet, the first part of Westover's argument is more persuasively developed than the second. In fact, this notion of a collective remedy largely disappears after the introduction. In his epilogue, Westover shifts his focus to the general claim that "the conflict between the nation as a republic and the nation as an empire may be one of the key features of democratic poetics in the United States," apparently in any era (203). Nonetheless, the cumulative work of his five major chapters does provide ample evidence that several early twentieth-century poets with differing agendas and formal interests use metaphors of settlement, mappings of colonial history, or other articulations of national self-making, to explore notions of political and cultural identity.

As this brief summary indicates, Westover's The Colonial Moment both is and is not a product of its (and our) critical moment. University presses and much university pedagogy discourage work on single authors, reflecting an earlier and broader professional movement away from focus on the work (say, the poem) and the author and toward transnational contexts, theory, and cultural studies. In this climate, readings of particular poems largely disappear from critical studies. This is, delightfully, not the case with The Colonial Moment, which provides generous and insightful analysis of significant poems in every one of its major chapters. Westover knows both how to read and how to use a reading effectively to make an argument. These aspects of his work make The Colonial Moment a pleasure to read.

Westover has also done his homework on individual authors with impressive...