Headhunting the Tastemakers

In the summer of 1936, John Maynard Keynes led an audiotour of the literary marketplace for BBC Radio. While the author of the recently published General Theory (1936) had a few complaints—for instance, that some modernist novelists thought it "almost a virtue . . . to empty on us the slops of [their] mind just as they come"—he found much more to recommend in every medium and genre he surveyed. Predictably, he praised friends like Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Lytton Strachey. But he also lauded obscure memoirists, journalists, mystery novelists, and pop psychologists. "Trash can be delightful," Keynes mused, "and, indeed, a necessary part of one's daily diet." Only by consuming a range of literary products, including newspapers, poetry magazines, polemical pamphlets, serial novels, and what Keynes calls the "skimming autobiography" could one learn to "read as easily as you breathe," a skill which Keynes implies is imperative to "the evolution of the contemporary world." He implores the imagined BBC listener to "acquire a wide general acquaintance with books," "approach them with all his senses," "touch[] many thousands, at least ten times as many as he really reads," "walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates," and "reaching in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain."¹

Keynes's commentary captures one of the paradoxes of literary modernism: despite the decade-long transatlantic depression, there seems to have been a thriving and diversified market for Anglophone literature, and a disproportionate degree of security and stability enjoyed by modernist writers in the US and UK during the interbellum. Evan Kindley's Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture (2017) interrogates this paradox. Kindley is preceded across portions of this terrain by scholars like Paul Delany, Mark McGurl, Lawrence Rainey, and Michael Szalay, but this book is distinguished by its attention to the careers of a specific subset of poet-critics who "participated, as none of their predecessors had or could have, in the life of the bureaucracy, aligning themselves with large institutions at a time of radical instability in the cultural economy" (4). It was largely the poet-critics' talent for making what Keynes terms "delightful trash" which prepared them for the bureaucracies that shielded them from financial insecurity and, perhaps unexpectedly, much excellent poetry was made under this shelter.

Kindley acknowledges that "the market for fiction did not appreciably contract during the Great Depression," but while novelists, journalists, and other professional prose-writers largely evaded "the parlous economic climate," poets were treated as purveyors of an expendable "luxury good," and thus "the crash of 1929 hit poet-critics as hard as any other group of writers or intellectuals, and in some ways harder" (73). The ensuing vicious cycle wiped out publishers and patrons, crippling the already precarious infrastructure that subsidized poetry's waning popular appeal. But the poet-critic's ancillary role has always been that of (as Gertrude Stein calls Ezra Pound) "village explainer" (1) and Kindley argues "the Depression— and the attendant expansion of the American welfare state—also created new opportunities for village explainers" (73). There were New Deal programs that directly employed poet-critics like Archibald MacLeish and Sterling Brown in research, editorial, and public humanities projects, and the Roosevelt administration further aided poet-critics by subsidizing public arts initiatives, flailing charitable organizations, and higher education institutions. As Kindley shows, New Deal dollars took a circuitous path to the pockets of even poet-critics, like William Carlos Williams, who were critical of government and nation, or reticent on principle (in quasi-libertarian fashion) about intervention in the culture market.

Kindley asserts, "There is no modernism without its village explainers" (3). But the poet-critics he tracks all struggle, both pragmatically and ideologically, to find a comfortable balance between their dual callings. Clearly, it is the critic portion of their identities that qualifies them for positions at the Rockefeller Foundation, the Library of Congress, and Cambridge, but it is as poets that they imagine and...