John Wheelwright, Sound Engineer

The life and poetry of John Wheelwright (1897–1940) testify to a subterranean link between two ostensibly very different cultural forms, the sonnet and radio broadcasting. To set about unfolding this surprising affiliation is also to assume the delightful responsibility of introducing readers to an idiosyncratic modern poet little-read these days, one for whom the sonnet and radio were objects of characteristically ingenious aesthetic investment. In the 1930s, Wheelwright’s artistic commitments to these sonorous technologies—first to the poetic form, and then to the communications medium—found their authorization in one-and-the-same deeply felt requirement: the desire to engineer a politically usable modernist poetry. In the final years of that decade, Wheelwright believed he had located at last, in the radical implications of radio broadcasting, a socialist horizon for modern verse. And yet his prior innovations in sonnet form so vividly betray the early stirrings of this quest that the largest stakes of these printed sonnets are most clearly apprehended in the light shed by his later career on the air. To read his sonnets well, in other words, we must read with an ear to radio.

For that reason, it makes sense to begin in 1938 at the University Club in Boston’s Back Bay, where for several months that autumn, Wheelwright ran a weekly poetry program on the World Wide Broadcasting Foundation’s noncommercial shortwave station W1XAL (later WRUL). According to its funders at the Rockefeller Foundation, since 1935 W1XAL had been “the only station in the United States with national coverage . . . devoted exclusively to educational programming.” Transmitting 50,000 watts across four shortwave bands, W1XAL was by the late 1930s a leading “university of the air,” disseminating “New England enlightenment” with the collaboration of faculty from Harvard and other universities to listeners across the country, and, increasingly in non-English languages, around the globe. To recite poetry into a W1XAL microphone was to hitch a ride on a powerful cultural apparatus, one that other entities like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pan-American Foundation, and the federal government were simultaneously using, in Good Neighborly fashion, to secure US interests abroad. It is high testimony indeed to W1XAL’S soft power that in May 1938, when congressional efforts to establish a government-owned shortwave station “to counter the heavy-handed propaganda of the Nazi and Fascist competition” were squashed by major networks, the Daily Boston Globe could point with beaming hometown pride to W1XAL, already pouring a star-spangled “deluge of high-powered thought . . . into the ether for a world audience.”

Given W1XAL’s educational mandate and its high-cultural affiliations, it’s hardly unusual that some of this “high-powered thought” issued from poets. It’s a good deal stranger to find a poet like Wheelwright in the mix. Those listeners tuning in from Peru, Trinidad, or New Zealand were doubtless unfamiliar with W1XAL’s poetry impresario, but Bostonians may have recognized Wheelwright, less perhaps from his poetry than from his minor cultural celebrity, the baffling figure he cut in a city so indelibly his milieu. “What Dublin was to Joyce,” recalled his friend Winfield Townley Scott, “Boston was to Wheelwright.” When remembered today, Wheelwright’s life is often recalled as a spectacle of contradictions. A direct descendent on his father’s side of the Antinomian rebel Rev. John Wheelwright (1592–1679), and on his mother’s side of the merchant Peter Chardon Brooks (1767–1849), once New England’s wealthiest man, even as his family’s finances deteriorated rapidly in the poet’s lifetime Wheelwright could boast of near-perfect Brahmin pedigree. But he also relished confounding this upper-crust exemplarity. As a young man grieving his father’s suicide, Wheelwright rejected the Puritan faith of his ancestors for a very high church Anglicanism, and after his political radicalization in the early 1930s, set himself the task of squaring Anglican and apocryphal Christian traditions with a drop-dead serious dialectical materialism. He describes his third and final collection of poems, 1940’s Political Self-Portrait—which marshals St. Paul alongside Lenin, and references to the “Apostolic Orders” alongside exhortations...