History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 (review)

As John Lowney notes in the introduction to his excellent History, Memory, and the Literary Left, poetry has received short shrift in the comparative boom of scholarship on the artistic Left of the 1930s and 1940s over the last fifteen or twenty years. This is somewhat ironic since Cary Nelson's 1989 Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and The Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 was one of the seminal studies ushering in this boom. However, with some notable exceptions, subsequent studies of the literary Left have focused on almost everything except poetry. Lowney addresses this gap in scholarship, joining a small band of distinguished scholars such as Nelson, Alan Filreis, William Maxwell, Stacy Morgan, and Michael Thurston, who have taken up the subject.

As is increasingly the case with scholars of artistic radicalism in the United States, Lowney seeks to place the cultural radicalism associated with "Third Period" and Popular Front Communism within a continuum of artistic and political practices while acknowledging the way that such epochal events as the onset of the Great Depression and the rise of the Cold War strained and disrupted continuity. Using six case studies (Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Thomas McGrath, and George Oppen), Lowney examines the various ways in which poets whose work was significantly shaped by the radical currents of the 1930s and 1940s engaged with what Lowney, after Richard Terdiman, sees as the modernist crisis of cultural memory occasioned by the disruptions of modern industrial society.

However, instead of imagining a premodern moment of organic community, say late medieval Europe, Lowney argues that the sort of memory promoted by the literary Left tended toward the recollection or memorializing of people (workers, farmers, oppressed nationalities, and so on) who had rarely, if ever, been the focus of such memory. Such engagement with cultural memory sometimes took the form of documenting or memorializing events that might have otherwise have gone unnoticed, or at least unsung. The epidemic of silicosis cases at Union Carbide's Gauley Bridge silica mine in West Virginia which was the subject of Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead" sequence in U.S. 1 (1938) or the daily lives of the residents of the Mecca Building on Chicago's South Side in Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca (1968) are cases in point. This "lest we forget" aspect of poetic memorializing is not only seen as a result of a perceived need for the subaltern writing her- or himself into the record, but also of an elegizing impulse that derives from the peculiar intensity of social disruption that takes place in working class communities, particularly, as Hughes and Brooks show, in African-American neighborhoods. In other words, one reason that Brooks wrote about the Mecca Building, where she worked for a time, is because it was knocked down as a part of an early "urban renewal" plan. One important contribution that Lowney's study makes is the way in which it successfully locates Elizabeth Bishop's Key West poetry in these sorts of recollecting and memorializing, linking Bishop with her more overtly Left contemporaries, such as her former college classmate Rukeyser.

Lowney also takes up some of the ways in which the literary Left that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s took up notions of cultural memory as tradition, whether one of revolutionary struggle (as was generally the case in the early 1930s) or of popular democratic struggle (as was more typical of the Popular Front era). He extends much of the newer scholarship on the connections between radical artists of the 1930s and 1940s and later cultural and political movements. In fact, most of the chapters on Hughes, Brooks, McGrath, and Oppen deal with their writing after the 1940s. His discussion of Brooks's In the Mecca, for example, shows how Brooks's first collection after her "conversion" to the Black Power and Black Arts movements, draws on work that...