Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (review)

This is a challenging, often fascinating book, equally notable for the impressive range of its scholarship, for its cogent attention to historical detail concerning the time of each text's composition, and for the author's keen appreciation of both the technical and the associative ways in which language works. Rachel Blau DuPlessis brings to this inquiry—it is no surprise—the poet'sawareness of language, which sometimes seems a little keener than that of other critics.

In the first of the volume's six chapters DuPlessis defines her goals and methods, and then in succeeding chapters addresses "gender ideologies of lyric," representations and politics of sexual intercourse, the "construction of modern male whiteness" as a refraction of blackness, the use of African American idiom and metaphor by black and white poets, and images of the Jew and the fear of the "mongrel" in American poetry. Her goal is to offer us a "social philology" of modern poetry, which she stipulates to mean "a reactivation of close reading to examine in poetry the textual traces and discursive manifestations of a variety of ideological assumptions, subject positions, and social concepts concerning gender, race, and religious culture" (1). ¹ "It is the purpose of this book," she asserts, "to offer reading strategies that can mediate between the historical terrain and the intimate poetic textures of a work" (1).

And that is precisely the persuasive strength of this book. Thus DuPlessis uses her formidable skill at laying bare the rhetorical strategies of a text to construct an account of some of the important ideologies of gender, race, and religion that form the cultural context of the poetry of the first half of the twentieth century. She grounds arguments about the writer's implicit assumptions not only in narrated event but, more significantly, in nuances of rhetoric and textual materiality, attending to "line break, stanza break, . . . caesurae, visual image and semantic image, etymology, phonemes, lateral associations, crypt words, puns . . . the diegesis with its actors and pronouns, and the whole text with its speaker or persona" (1).

To accomplish her task, DuPlessis selects revelatory readings from major modernist poets and poets important for context, several to a chapter, often recurring to the same figures for different examples and analyses in subsequent chapters. For example, she offers sustained readings of William Carlos Williams, H. D., Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, and Marianne Moore in chapter 2 and returns to Pound and especially Loy in chapter 3 (along with providing briefer treatments of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence). In chapter 4 she gives extended attention to Vachel Lindsay, and to Eliot and Stevens as a response to him, assessing the concerns and practices of these white writers alongside those of black writers Helene Johnson, Sterling Brown, and Langston Hughes. Then, in chapter 5, she looks at Hughes and Stevens again, as well as at Countee Cullen, considering all three in the context of contemporary ideas on the primitive, particularly including Marius de Zayas's influential 1916 volume, African Negro Art: Its Influence on Modern Art. DuPlessis concludes, in her discussion of "wondering [sic] Jews" in chapter 6, with further examination of Eliot, Moore, and Loy, along with penetrating comments on Louis Zukofsky and Emma Lazarus. There is no sustained discussion of single figures in this chapter, but there are important interpretive readings of, for example, Loy's "Songs to Joannes" and "Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose," Eliot's "Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama," Lindsay's "Congo," and several short poems by Stevens, including "Bantams in Pine-Woods" and "The Silver Plough-Boy." More important, DuPlessis weaves together the cultural story these examples narrate, almost always avoiding the special pleading to which the use of brief excerpts from a poem or of brief poems from a corpus can lead. That...