Poetry: 1900 to the 1950s

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Mark Steven offers an erudite introduction to Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (Hopkins), and I summarize his readings of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky below. Mediation is the key concept of the introduction and in Steven's arguments about modernist epic, which he understands to be a totalizing genre. Mediation is the means of demonstrating the connection between the world and literature. Steven offers an intensely researched and sophisticated investigation of the impact of communism on Williams and Zukofsky, but he writes for a coterie familiar with communist intellectual and political theories. Readers unfamiliar with the jargon in which Steven is steeped are likely to find his book hard going, even if they care about social justice, the history of communism, and the authors whose work he addresses.

i General

Julia Daniel discusses poetic responses to parks in Building Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning (Virginia). Drawing on the discourse of professional landscape architects, Daniel explores the interactions among modernist versions of pastoral and early-20th-century city planning, historical ideas about the disappearance of the frontier, the aesthetics of the natural world, and the social construction of space. She addresses the work of Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, and Williams. I address her chapter on Sandburg here and cover her other chapters in relevant sections below. As Daniel points out, the modern park is a new thing, contemporary with the growth of industrialized cities. "[The] park goer was a new agent," she writes, "both consumer of a new kind of public space and a constant threat to it. Regulating unruly bodies in parkscapes became an ongoing concern for designers, managers, public officials, and law enforcement. If parks embody fantasies of idealized natures, they also contained anxieties about urban corruption." While park planners and theorists drew on Romantic conceptions of sublime nature, they also constituted a new professional class in the social worlds inhabited by each of the poets she covers. In her chapter "Carl Sandburg and the Living American City," Daniel addresses Sandburg's poetic vision of Chicago in relation to urban planning, including the development of city parks. In particular, she summarizes the vision of the landscape architect Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan for Chicago and explains how its concepts and discourse are echoed by Sandburg. This leads her to emphasize the ecological dimensions of Sandburg's writing, given its interest in the interconnections between cityscapes and elements of the natural world: "both the architect and the poet incorporate nature into their vision of the urban environment." They "materialize a frontier ethos in even the most modern and mechanistic corners of Chicago." Unlike Burnham, however, Sandburg valorizes process. For the poet, the city is "a constant negotiation between its plan and its materials" or, to use Sandburg's own terms, between "the bevels and the blueprints." Among the poems Daniel addresses are "Muckers," "The Harbor," "Skyscraper," "The Skyscraper Loves Night," and "Windy City."

Steven Gould Axelrod and Natalie Gerber guest-edited an issue of the Wallace Stevens Journal (WSJour 41, i) devoted to articles about Robert Frost and Stevens in relation to each other. Zachary Tavlin ("Feeling Strange and Turning Back: Stevens, Frost, and the Foreign," pp. 50–64) presents a postcolonial reading of the work of the two poets. Tavlin undertakes this approach by considering the "encroachment of the foreign" in poems by both writers. Adopting the binary of self and other as a fundamentally postcolonial problem, he discusses themes of "immigration, settlement, xenophobia, and colonialism." Drawing on the work of such famous thinkers and writers as Simon Gikandi, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, Charles Altieri, Al Filreis, and Emmanuel Levinas, Tavlin finds that Stevens and Frost "produce competing models for the cultivation or avoidance of experiences with foreignness. In one aspect of Stevens's writing, "the effort is then to open up the possibility of crossing strange frontiers here and now, wherever governing empirical-epistemological paradigms break down, even on an ordinary evening in New Haven." In addition, Tavlin argues that "for Stevens, there is foreignness and...