History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935-1968

Focusing on six poets—Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, George Oppen, and Thomas McGrath—John Lowney's book argues that their approaches to cultural memory were deeply inflected by both their experiences of the Depression and their leftist commitments. Lowney grounds his approach to cultural memory in Pierre Nora's concept of lieux de mémoire, which distinguishes "cultural memory" from "history" in modern societies as essentially "archival." Further, Lowney wants to recuperate a concept of "collective memory," not in the problematic sense of a hegemonized collective but of a socially dialogic memorialization. Lowney reads the documentary impulses of the poets discussed, especially in their long poems, as ways of articulating a dialogic and fragmentary memorial against the amnesiac forces of hegemony. He identifies the recurring motif of ruins as emblematic in this project, exemplified in the excerpt from Wallace Stevens's "The Man on the Dump" that serves as the book's first epigraph: "The dump is full / Of Images" (1). For Lowney such sites as the dump, ghettoes, ecologically damaged rural spaces, and battered coastal fringes epitomize both the devastating effects of the Depression-era social experience and the myriad possibilities for politically resistant acts of memorialization. The ruined national landscape produced under these conditions mirrors the fractured and perhaps ruined possibilities of poetry and cultural memory for mid-century poets; and in turn ruins also metaphorize the shattered hopes for leftist change remaining in the aftermath of the Depression.

This study has many strengths, and Lowney's approach to the motif of "ruins" is one of its most promising. Although cultural memory in twentieth-century American poetry has been addressed by several critics, no one else has approached it through the trope of ruins. Lowney's excellent scholarship illuminates many often ignored or forgotten dimensions of social, political, and cultural history. Through carefully researched and critically nuanced readings Lowney problematizes simplistic categorizations long-held in American poetry criticism. Although several of these writers have been given considerable attention in recent scholarship, the focus on Bishop's early leftism provides a much-needed alternative to the tendency to depoliticize her work; and the chapter on McGrath brings welcome attention to a poet who has been unfairly ignored. His chapter on Brooks reveals important continuities between her critically celebrated early formalism and her later Black Aesthetic period. Lowney shows how poets often read through an a-political formalism (Bishop and Oppen) were deeply invested in leftist political concerns; and he also shows how poets often marginalized for their leftism (Rukeyser, Hughes, and McGrath) produced formally innovative approaches to cultural memory.

Yet the book could have done more with its central theme and motif and provided closer attention to form. Numerous studies of Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead have recently appeared, and most have provided the historical detail Lowney presents; but he has little to say about its form. Overwhelmingly his commentary focuses on subject and content, but pays little attention to the specific tactics of the poetic line that realize Rukeyser's counter-memorializing project. By ignoring formal elements, Lowney continues an unfortunate tendency in studies of left-oriented poetry that privilege content. This lack of close explication is evident in almost every chapter: most of the Bishop chapter, for example, focuses on her prose works. It's especially unfortunate in the McGrath chap-ter: here is a poet whose unique musical handling of lineation, alliteration, and rhythm deserves a careful analysis. The promising thematic motif of ruins presented so well in the introduction often seems presumed more than shown in the rest of the chapters: while Lowney's careful historical scholarship demonstrates how the Gauley Bridge region or Key West were ruined, he doesn't demonstrate through close textual analysis how the poetry articulates "ruin" in relation to memory in each case.

Despite such shortcomings this book provides many excellent readings. Lowney's analysis of Brooks's "In the Mecca" is nuanced and informative. The chapter on McGrath, although it needs more attention to poetics, is rich and well-researched. And his chapter on Oppen's "Of Being Numerous" is one of the best I've read because it gives the poem the historical context so necessary to appreciating its political significance. Overall this book admirably complements a growing body of critical work that has recuperated the leftism of twentieth-century American poetics once banished by a generation of postwar critics.