Partisan Experiments: Communism, Poetry, and the Liberal Imagination, 1934–1940

The Partisan Review played an important, yet unacknowledged, role in the development of modernist poetry, publishing important poets and encouraging exploration of linkages between politics and aesthetic experimentation. While initial efforts in the magazine were little more than proletarian propaganda, a more sophisticated, if less direct, exploration of such linkages evolved. This coincided with a move away from communism toward a liberal humanist Jewish identity.