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  • Poetry:1900 to the 1940s
  • Barry Ahearn

i. General Studies

In American Experimental Poetry and Democratic Thought (Oxford) Alan Marshall considers poets from both the 19th and 20th centuries who were notable for their innovative verse. He does not, however, want to contribute further to the history of the poets' formal inventiveness. Marshall concentrates on poets who are particularly concerned with the idea of democracy, and selects them because they exemplify how the nation's "'pervasive tendency toward equality' [Tocqueville's phrase] gets recognized, expressed, or thought about in poetry." So how does Marshall measure those recognitions, expressions, and thoughts? He uses political and economic philosophy. The most important thinkers brought to bear are Hannah Arendt, Marx, and Heidegger. Marshall insists that issues raised during the American Revolution continue to resonate in American poetry, often in unexpected ways. His analysis of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, for example, positions them on opposite sides of the fence. Williams partakes of the volatile, radical spirit of the Revolution that insists on free play and equality. Stevens is aligned with the Federalist critique of the Revolution that seeks to replace it with a stable but vital Constitution. Some of Marshall's highest praise is reserved for George Oppen. He depicts Oppen as outgrowing an early (Objectivist) satisfaction with the poem as an object achieving perfect rest. As Oppen matures, he comes to see that [End Page 371] the complications and paradoxes of "lived intersubjectivity" demand a poetic both bold (in that it ventures into the volatile realm of politics and speech) and humble (in that Oppen recognizes human limitation). Marshall's methodology has both its strength and its weakness. He does not impose a Procrustean ideological grid to which his poets must conform. He practices a freewheeling, associative logic that often produces provocative, even brilliant insights. Yet the connections between poets, and between poets and philosophers, are often loose. One wonders if the concerns he brings to the poems are so deeply and consistently felt by the poets. At any rate, future commentators on American poetry and political issues will not be able to ignore this book.

In "Why Modernist Claims for Autonomy Matter" (JML 32, iii: 1-21) Charles Altieri focuses primarily on paintings by Camille Pissaro, Paul Cezanne, and Kasimir Malevich. But his claims about the nature of modernism in these artworks relate directly to poetry; he demonstrates the connection by capping his essay with a brief analysis of Stevens's "Nomad Exquisite." Altieri casts his essay as a response to the claim that modernism represents a "failure to preserve a view of nature that can be authoritative." According to this indictment, modernist autonomy represents a lamentable abandonment of the sustaining power of natural form. Altieri deploys the time-honored, but still potent, rebuttal that anyone who invokes the authority of nature does not understand that propositions about nature derive from cultural presuppositions. Nature amounts to what we say about it. Modernist masters recognized this, and sought to establish their autonomy through a balancing act involving the claims of artistic tradition, internal formal relationships of the work of art, and two other relations, that between artifact and maker, and artifact and audience. "Authority," Altieri insists, "resides . . . in the articulation of persistent tensions among mutually determining and mutually limiting forces." Although Altieri covers some familiar ground, his closely reasoned, densely packed argument will repay the attention of anyone concerned with modernist aesthetics.

In contrast to Altieri's international perspective, another study asks us to take a closer look at regionalism. Chris Green's The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism (Palgrave) adopts as its geographical center a relatively small portion of Appalachia. He ranges, however, through publishing history, race relations, literary history, academic history, and folklore studies. Green casts his net so broadly because the connections among authors, scholars, publishers, [End Page 372] and historians are themselves manifold. For example, it would seem at first glance that New School professor Horace Kallen's advocacy of cultural pluralism during the early decades of the century would have little to do with the publication of James Still's Hounds on the Mountain (1939), a collection of poems celebrating the people...

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