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  • Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s by Milton A. Cohen
  • Marilyn Walker
Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s. By Milton A. Cohen. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2010.

In Milton A. Cohen’s Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s, he convincingly argues that literary critics marshaled political and intellectual activism to persuade middle-class poets to write on behalf of the American worker. Before the Great Depression, Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), E. E. Cummings (1894–1962), Robert Frost (1874–1963), and William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) were praised by literary audiences. They had autonomy to write about a myriad of topics ranging from nature to observations about daily life. However, with the advent of a national economic crisis, the previously mentioned poets were bestowed with new responsibilities such as contemplating the politics of the Great Depression and representing socially and economically disenfranchised people. According to Cohen’s scholarship, critics such as Mike Gold, Malcolm Cowley, and Eda Lou Walton, encouraged Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams to write about the working class and the challenges they encountered in modern society.

Interestingly, predating Cohen’s cadre of poets, working-class life infused poetry, fiction, and drama. For example, in the Victorian period (1832–1901), writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1901), Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865), and Charles Dickens (1812–1870) composed sympathetic portrayals of laborers during the Industrial Revolution (1750–1850). Likewise, during the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1940), writers such as Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), Claude McKay [End Page 72] (1889–1948), and Langston Hughes (1902–1967) also expressed working-class concerns through setting, dialect, and attire. Furthermore, the scholarship of William J. Maxwell and Arnold Rampersad has chronicled McKay and Hughes’s association with the political left and communism. However, Cohen’s niche is mapping the artistic advocacy of literary critics and poets and illuminating the influence of leftist critics upon American modernist poetry.

Consequently, accompanied by histories on literary magazines such as The Liberator and New Masses, personal letters, and explications of verse, Cohen’s Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics examines the responses of Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams to economic disaster and working-class suffering. Thus, Cohen close reads the structure, style, and content of each writer’s poetry from the 1930s and their resistance or conformity to the political environment. Whereas Cummings crafted poetic homage to the working class, Frost emphasized individualism for the proletariat. Simultaneously, as Cohen identifies the distinctive qualities of each poet, he also demonstrates their efforts to craft socially conscious verse.

Although Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics comprehensively analyzes a dimension of being a modernist poet in the 1930s, Cohen could have also emphasized the perils of literary critics influencing poetic production. Instead of inspiration guiding the poet, leftist critics were insisting upon a criterion for literature and attempting to manipulate the creative process. Ironically, the leftist critics were also imposing a supply-and-demand dynamic for a specialized literary sub-genre and jeopardizing the authenticity of artistically progressive verse. Despite the aforementioned reservations, Cohen’s book revels in the poetry and politics of the 1930s.

Marilyn Walker
National Technical Institute for the Deaf,
Rochester Institute for Technology
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