History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry 1935-1968 by John Lowney (review)

John Lowney's History, Memory, and the Literary Left offers a reconsideration of several poets whose work crosses the divide between the "modernist" and "postmodern" periods. In so doing, he builds a case against the dissection of the canon into disengaged pre- and post- 1945 segments and establishes the continuity of the influence of the Popular Front and the literary left from the Depression into the Vietnam era. Lowney fortifies this historical reconfiguration with a captivating discussion of a common thematic thread: the salvaging of sites of cultural memory from potential loss and ruin which might "otherwise be diminished or forgotten" (229). From the social and economic ruins of the Depression, each poet mines valuable cultural memories and hope for the resurrection of their respective communities.

The book begins with an ambitious historical discussion establishing the importance of the literary left in the poetics of late modernist poets. Drawing on related studies by Richard Terdimann, Michael Denning, Cary Nelson, and Isador Schneider, Lowney carefully establishes that "normative definitions of modernism and postmodernism" unduly restrict our understandings of "poets whose literary reputations were formed in the 1930s or 1940s" who "fit neither of the generational models" (11). Further, in this introductory chapter, Lowney establishes Wallace Stevens's "Man on the Dump" as a model for the discussions that will follow—using a site of ruin (the dump) not only as "a site of lyric revery" but also as a signifier of "the deflated social value of art in a time of socioeconomic crisis" (24). The poets Lowney discusses, however, neither wallow in nor decry the spectacle of decay; each mines the dump for "material for imaginative recycling, for the production of value from otherwise useless consumer waste" (26). Finding beauty and potential where others find ugliness and despair, Lowney presents the poets in his book as salvage artists.

In subsequent chapters, Lowney discusses Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead, Elizabeth Bishop's North and South, Langston Hughes's Montage of a Dream Deferred, Gwendolyn Brook's In the Mecca, Thomas McGrath's Letter to an Imaginary Friend, and George Oppen's Of Being Numerous. The discussion of Rukeyser's work centers on the poet's response to "the silicosis deaths of hundreds of miners employed in the Union Carbide hydroelectric project in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia" (35). Her poems commemorate "a site that corporate and government officials would have preferred to forget" (35). The chapter offers juicy historical details of Union Carbide bribing doctors to misdiagnose workers' symptoms and paying local morticians to bury dead workers on the sly (44). It also traces Rukeyser's construction of a series of poems that gives a voice to the victims that at once preserves the specificity of them as individuals and offers them a "collective power" through "dialogic juxtaposition" (66).

Lowney's chapter on Elizabeth Bishop observes that North and South's postwar publication date has obscured the "cultural geography" in the poems, which he posits were marked by Bishop's experiences visiting the Florida Keys in the winter of 1936-7 (67). Decimated by a Labor Day hurricane that knocked out the railway link between the Keys and the mainland, Key West was isolated, accessible only by boat, and the site of the deaths of "hundreds of veterans" who had been hired by the WPA to construct bridges connecting the island to the mainland. Lowney carefully establishes Bishop's connection with the literary politics of the Popular Front and shows how her poetry manages to find "solace in recognizing that a shattered Key West can remake itself from the wreckage of the hurricane, Depression, or navy" (98).

Lowney's discussion of Langston Hughes offers one of the strongest arguments against canonical divisions that minimize the impact of 1930s leftist poetry. He points out that

the disregard for Depression-era African American poetry in particular has resulted not only from the literary historical problem...