Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism by Mark Steven, and: Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley (review)

Making sense of William Carlos Williams's political commitments continues to be of interest in all its rather complicated forms and iterations. One recent, ambitious approach is that of Mark Steven in Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism, a book apparently timed to appear in October 2017 on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Appear it did, staking a claim on links connecting Williams, Pound, and Zukofsky not just as modernist poetic innovators and experimenters, and thus literary revolutionists of sorts, but as poets deeply implicated in the politics of communist revolution in the twentieth century. Less specifically devoted to Williams, and somewhat in contrast to Steven's enlistment of Williams as a revolutionist through the implications of style and genre, Poet Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley, portrays the attenuation of the radical impulses of modernism as the twentieth century wore on and Cold War liberalism as a strategic safe zone for careerists in poetry.

Links between the three writers who are the primary focus of Steven's narrative, with Williams as a sort of pivot, are pretty well known, and Steven does not focus on the biographical with respect to Williams except to note his participation in the Greenwich Village milieu of the 1920s. The section on Pound treats the arc of Pound's engagement with Lenin and Soviet Communism in the early Cantos through to an ambiguous closure, in Steven's complicated troping about Canto 74, concluding that "communism, as manifest in the USSR, names the force that satirically brushes Pound's fascist tendency back against itself, generating a contradictory form that is unable to reconcile its political ambition with its historical content" (96). The passage indicates the level of abstraction at which Steven proceeds while offering a Marxian interpretation of major work by Williams in the middle section of the book. (I think "interpretation" rather than "analysis" is the appropriate term to describe these procedures, but more of that in a moment.) It also indicates the dialectical troping characteristic of Steven's mode of argument. Finally, Zukofsky appears as an actual communist although his "lines seem to know that" their "endorsement of communism" is "ultimately an idealism." The self-reflexiveness of Steven's phrasing here and throughout the book makes his critical judgments seem weighty, but it is difficult at points like this not to think that it might be good to admit the self-contradiction of divided ambitions and, in Zukofsky's case (perhaps in Pound's), to posit that the struggle to unite modernist poetic ambition and political determinism in one big work was not just "wrong from the start" (to paraphrase "Mauberly"), and undone by history, but necessarily so.

Encountering Steven's modes of argumentation might give one pause well before the section of Red Modernism devoted to Williams (97–161), humorously subtitled "Moscow on the Hudson." Indeed one might balk at the marshalling of philosophical, stylistic, rhetorical and other forces together in the introduction on "Modernism's Communism," where a rhetorical sleight of hand accomplishes an intrinsic connection between revolution in poetry and political and economic revolution, as in the Bolshevik Revolution. Really? Something there is that doesn't quite trust the connection. And yet perhaps there is something after all to be learned from the struggle to connect.

Steven sees all three writers as operating in the genre of the epic, which takes some arguing despite the traditional and casual use of the word in the twentieth century to describe long poems in English that invoke or enlist history or politics and/or treat in part some agony or antagonism of a hero in an arguably world-historical context. Steven's premises are difficult to untangle sequentially and in any short form...