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

There was a time when modernism, its genealogy and matrix, essentially consisted of two poets: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In the wings, according to a dissenting group of scholars and climatologists, stood a third poet ready to join or supplant them: Wallace Stevens. For many decades, despite the work of some devoted enthusiasts, William Carlos Williams remained, in the words of admirer Robert Lowell, "a byline" (43). By the 1980s, Eliot had lost his sheen, and Marjorie Perloff could summarize the situation in a simple question: "Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?" (The answer was Pound.) But by the mid-1990s, the logjam had broken. Peter Nicholls helpfully transformed modernism into "modernisms," a shift institutionalized by the establishment of the Modernist Studies Association and its adventurous journal Modernism/Modernity. At first the transition was gradual. In his book Modernisms Nicholls placed Pound and Eliot at the center of the story, in chapters called "Modernity and the 'Men of 1914'" and "The Narratives of High Modernism," whereas H.D., Stein, Williams, Stevens, Loy, and Moore were huddled together under the almost dismissive rubric, "At a Tangent: Other Modernisms." This arrangement, despite the pluralization in the book's title, accurately replicated the literary history that had initially emphasized the "achievement" and "art" of Eliot and then the "poetry" and "era" of Pound, while shunting Stevens, Williams, and Moore off to their little "homemade world," valuable but at a tangent from the main affair. Even the Modernist Studies Association began its existence focused on Pound, though it quickly developed into something much more diverse than that.

The present situation is, happily, even more complicated. Anthologies of the 1950s through the 1970s routinely gave the most space to Pound, Eliot, Stevens, and, as a sop to readers who couldn't get with the experimental program, Frost. Today one prominent anthology (Ramazani, Ellmann, and O'Clair) gives the most space to Eliot, Crane, Pound, Williams, and Stevens, in that order. Another (Nelson) prioritizes Williams, Eliot, Pound, Crane, and Hughes. A third (Axelrod, Roman, and Travisano) gives greatest representation to Eliot, Williams, Pound, Moore, and Frost. Despite the innovations, it's interesting to note, after all these years, the continued paucity of female poets and poets of color. Only Moore and Hughes reach the top echelon—in one anthology apiece, though they are strongly represented in all three. It's also interesting that Eliot and Pound continue to dominate the field, though Williams rather than Stevens seems to be the poet who has now risen to join them.

Further along the cutting edge, critical books are presently appearing that focus entirely on the kinds of poet previously considered tangential. Susan McCabe's Cinematic Modernism studies Stein, Williams, H.D., and Moore. Jeffrey Westover's The Colonial Moment, the book under review here, concentrates on Moore, Williams, Frost, Crane, and Hughes. Eliot, Pound, and Stevens barely appear in these books' indexes. Surveys of American modernist poetry that avoid discussion of Eliot, Pound, and Stevens? Is such a thing possible? What would have been unthinkable in previous decades, except in books focusing on gender or race, has now become routine. Soon the phenomenon may go without saying. Next we may encounter books on modernism that use Reznikoff, Noguchi, von Freytag-Loringhoven, Ribera Chevremont, Bennett, Niedecker, and Cole Porter as their representative examples. Now, heaven knows, anything goes.

Jeffrey Westover's perceptive and humane study, The Colonial Moment, examines "the way five modern American poets portray the colonization of the New World" (3). But except for Frost, who arguably might have been replaced by someone like Jeffers or Zukofsky, Westover's chosen poets are oppositional toward colonialism. Perhaps the book might better have been titled The Anticolonial Moment, because it tends to record moments when the poets anxiously distance themselves from the imperial impulses inherent in American history. Of course the chosen poets are generally complicit in colonialism as well. It is impossible to be a citizen of...