From the poetry front

As I write, it is Christmas Eve, the snow is falling, and Denise Levertov has died. Yesterday, I heard a taped interview with the poet: she described reading her poems at antiwar demonstrations, receiving letters of thanks from attendees suddenly turned on to poetry by her work, of young activists sallying forth equipped with knapsacks containing her poems. The frail voice of the elder poet evoked an era in which it seemed to many that poetry did—indeed was—political work, and that the audience reaction to poetry was tangible. But today, all the instruments agree that it is a dark, cold day for seriously entertaining such a notion.

All the same, poets persist in doing so, as they have since the Renaissance. What has varied is the response of audiences and critics. The cold war hypostasization of a separation of spheres between poetry and politics seemed inadequate by the late 1970s, when it began to be acceptable in the American academy to consider the politics of canonical modern poets. By the early 1990s, more critics of modern U.S. poetry (such as Susan Schweik, Maria Damon, Cheryl Walker, Walter Kalaidjian, and Alan Golding) considered previously neglected figures, and did so in light of their politics. Nonetheless, the respectability of canonicity continues even for more radical critics, who often feel compelled to include a disclaimer apologizing for the lack of literary merit of the poems presented.

This compulsion is not surprising, given that for twentieth-century American readers, as for their forebears, poetry has signified the literary absolute, the highest form of high art, such that any move away from an exclusive preoccupation with literary excellence (however defined) has consistently been taken with very small steps. This fundamental theoretical inertia at the heart of poetry studies begs the most important questions: why is poetry, more than any other genre, regarded in this way? Why have critics felt it necessary to write out of (or around) this paradigm rather than about it—or to simply ignore it altogether? In effect, the notion of poetry as universal cultural value (aesthetic, moral, political), internalized by the poetry critic, necessarily produces an anachronistic reading—especially when carried over into literary history. Today’s values are not those of poetry readers and writers in the past. If Allen Tate could read Emily Dickinson as a modernist, it was only in ignorance (honest or deliberate) of her reception by readers of the 1890s.

This premise is precisely Mark Van Wienen’s most decisive intervention in Partisans and Poets. He distinguishes his work from that of other feminist and historicist critics of U.S. poetry who “continue to emphasize the situation of individuals responding to and criticizing the war system, not those collectives that shape the war system and those that might actually dismantle it” (29). Indeed, his claim for poetry is that it is efficacious; this assumption prompts van Wienen to remove his work from the realm of “poetry studies” altogether:

what counts in the constitution and cultural power of these forms of “partisan poetry” is not their status as poetry per se, but their placement within the ideologies and political practices of particular groups. Therefore, the story told in this book does not focus on “literary history” so much as on political history.

(34)

That history is of how these poems “helped form, shape, speak to, and speak on behalf of political collectives” (3) and even become “the foundation for group identity” (11)—big claims for a “marginal” literary genre.

Thus Van Wienen’s book, perhaps more than any other in the recent generation of critics, changes the question, as he puts it, from “But is the poetry any good?” to “good for what?” (24). His project will be “making poetry the primary media [sic] for analyzing American culture during the Great War” (38) rather than studying (any) canonical modernist poets in the “context” of World War I while continually genuflecting...