Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

At the risk of summoning the shade of Lionel Trilling, it could be said that the problem of authenticity intrigued many critics this year. The issue takes a variety of shapes. What form of dialect—if any— constitutes the truly African American voice? How do poets in the 1930s respond to the demand to be authentically responsive to political and economic crises? Does sound or print represent the most genuine form of a poem? Must a poet be morally inspired to write with maximum authenticity? Such questions, of course, are not likely to be settled soon.

i General Studies

It is not every day that someone proposes to add a new critical term to the field of literary analysis. Rob Wallace, however, in his Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism (Continuum) dares to take that leap. The test cases for introducing improvisation as a useful tool are Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and Langston Hughes. First, however, Wallace defines it: "In its most basic form, improvisation involves the reshuffling, revising, and recreation of information, using pre-existing materials to make something new" (italics in original). Perhaps improvisation can best be understood as the attempt to broaden and deepen the expressive capacities of any formal language. As Wallace points out, improvisation is not simply acting without constraints but playing against and within already elaborated rules. William James looms large as the philosopher whose definitions of pragmatism demonstrate that Americans are adept at improvisatory maneuvers. Fittingly, Wallace even finds in a passage from Henry James "as precise a definition of what happens during improvisation as any [he had] encountered." The invocation of Henry might lead us to suppose that improvisation should be understood as occurring in the precincts of an ivory tower. But not so. Wallace elevates improvisation to signal importance by linking it to "cultures of opposition." In the case of the poets he considers, that culture is African American. Therefore Wallace considers how musical improvisation, in particular that associated with jazz, may illuminate poetic practice. Wallace tends to praise or condemn his authors according to the degree to which they allow or fail to allow improvisatory experiments to lead them to democratic vistas, but he also cautions that improvisation per se is "never inherently 'good' or 'bad.'" Although American history seems to nudge practitioners of improvisation in a liberal direction, one can imagine other times and places where it might be used for conservative or even reactionary ends. Be that as it may, if the test of a new critical term is the value it might have beyond the domain of its first use, then "improvisation" passes that test.

Milton A. Cohen's Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s (Alabama) revisits the political and aesthetic demands on artists that arose in that period, and compares the responses of the four poets to those developments. There are few surprises and discoveries; almost all Cohen's sources are printed rather than from the archives. Nevertheless, he usefully compares the careers of the poets in relation to the leftward drift in the arts. Cohen looks at their major works during the decade and summarizes the critical responses of reviewers. He concludes that on the whole the poets benefited from the changed political and aesthetic climate of the 1930s, if only because it forced them to think deeply about their art. Cohen believes that Wallace Stevens owes much of the success of "The Man with the Blue Guitar" to his brief "political period." Cohen notes E. E. Cummings's lifelong resistance to conformity and his reliance on individual insight. While these qualities had endeared him to rebellious critics and intellectuals during the 1920s, his refusal to join the march of Marxism made him a target for their slings and arrows. Cummings's response to adverse notices was to grow "more extreme and rigid in defining and asserting his individuality." Robert Frost became the target of similarly negative criticism, but Cohen points out that he was more adept at literary skirmishing than Cummings: he "cultivated allies" to plead his case before the republic of [End...