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  • Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s
  • Matthew Hofer

Scholarly publications on modern American poetry—in journals, monographs, and edited volumes, too—are somewhat rarer in 2006 than in recent years, and the critical engagements that do address the art are less prone to be organized around a single author, period, or nation. The most remarkable exceptions to this otherwise accurate generalization are two impressive new monographs dedicated exclusively to Hart Crane’s poetry and poetics, Brian Reed’s Hart Crane: After His Lights and Gordon A. Tapper’s The Machine That Sings: Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body. A third exception, leaving aside the single-author criterion, is available in Suzanne Churchill’s The Little Magazine “Others” and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry, a fine examination of the circulation of U.S. free verse between 1915 and 1919. However, the majority of contributions to scholarship that incorporate the analysis of American poetry from 1900 through the 1940s tends to center on large problems in literary or cultural studies, and therefore registers relatively little concern for conventional historical, national, and even generic boundaries. The most significant examples of such work in 2006 certainly include Walter Kalaidjian’s study of trauma and witness, The Edge of Modernism; Jerome McGann’s study of technology and literary discourse, The Scholar’s Art; and Robert Scholes’s study of critical categories and readerly pleasure, Paradoxy of Modernism. While such capacious projects tend to fall outside the bounds of this particular chapter, each of them does address modernism in ways that are both surprising and provocative. These books resist neat classification and [End Page 359] yet make claims that should be broadly felt by critics and readers of modernist poetry alike.

i General Studies: High Modernist Poetry

Charles Altieri’s The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After (Blackwell) exemplifies the virtues of lucid and accessible criticism that has been produced for a “literate public” by one of the field’s leading scholars. Although the straightforwardly literary historical project of this book-length introduction avoids unfamiliar or esoteric ground, there is nevertheless a good deal here for more knowledgeable readers to contemplate as they track Altieri’s sophisticated trajectory from high modernism to what comes “after.” The path of the book, defined by poets’ epistemological and psychological resistance to the basic cultural values that they inherited, proceeds from “The New Realism” (Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams) through the rise of impersonality and the resistance to rhetoric (T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and Marianne Moore) to the failure and subsequent renewal of the modernist project (Williams, George Oppen, and Langston Hughes), and concludes with an ultimate “return” to rhetoric (Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden). With this organizational structure, the volume progresses smoothly from its introductory overview to its closing consideration, “Modernist Dilemmas and Early Post-Modernist Responses.”

Altieri orients his readers at the outset to his methods and goals by referring to other Blackwell introductions to 20th-century poetry, Christopher MacGowan’s Twentieth-Century Poetry (2004) and Marjorie Perloff’s 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (2002). His work, he notes, is less similar to an inclusive overview like MacGowan’s than it is to Perloff’s comparatively circumscribed path through the century. However, he also recognizes that his “more dialectical narrative” differs from Perloff’s account “of loss and rediscovery based on very few exemplary figures” in that he is expressly concerned with “every generation of modernist writing until the 1980s.” The terms of this dialectical narrative of renewal are defined by an initial sense of political freedom through formal experimentation (thesis), which is compromised by the inability of innovative high modern art to respond to social emergency during the 1930s (antithesis), but is resolved by later modernists who recuperate the impulse to stylistic invention yet simultaneously repudiate the motivations that had previously informed it (synthesis). Altieri justifies [End Page 360] the scrupulous attention he often pays to concepts and contexts as a means of responsibly engaging particular projects both in themselves and in historical relation to one another. Indeed, the guiding concept of literary “sampling” points to the two main objectives of Altieri’s project: first, to locate...

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