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Introduction The pressure of the contemporaneous from the time of the beginning of the World War to the present time has been constant and extreme. No one can have lived apart in a happy oblivion. . . .We are preoccupied with events, even when we do not observe them closely.We have a sense of upheaval.We feel threatened. Wallace Stevens, 1936 — [P]olitics was placed at the center of the times to the extent that even writers who were apparently unaffected by it felt the moral necessity of justifying their indifference. William Phillips and Philip Rahv, 1937 — Imagine you are a modernist poet, and it is 1931. In the 1920s you were a critical success: you enjoyed the approbation of your peers, a small circle of poets and critics—the cognoscenti.Now,almost overnight,everything has changed. In the face of growing hordes of the unemployed, the breadlines and soup kitchens, the bank failures and foreclosures, the utter confusion of business moguls and the paralysis of the White House, many of your colleagues —very many—have concluded that capitalism is crumbling in this deepest of all crashes ( just as Marx had predicted) and that the future, the only viable foreseeable future, belongs to communism, a worthy and promising economic system. A massive conversion is under way, a mass migration to the left:friends and fellow writers have left the sidelines and joined the struggle. In addition, a younger generation of writers and critics is arriving—more each day—who need no converting, who already accept the tenets of Marxism. And those tenets, applied to literature, discussed and debated in countless articles and symposia,have utterly changed the direction of literary effort. Modernism is out; proletarian literature is in. Freud is out; Marx is in. Babbitt is no longer the subject;Paris is no longer the refuge;“pure art” or “art for art’s sake” is no longer a credible aesthetic philosophy; 1920s despair ,nihilism,and elitism are now unwelcome attitudes.The Dial and The Little Review are defunct. New Masses and The New Republic are what the intelligentsia now read. Now the subject is the American working class, 2 Introduction unemployed or striking for decent wages or better working conditions. The mood is upbeat.The artist’s social stance is no longer amused detachment or indifference,but involvement and activism.And “pure art”—your art—must now recognize social realities in a style no longer esoteric but comprehensible, even inspiring, to the working class. The pressure is on. Critics and reviewers (recent converts themselves,many of them) increasingly judge literature by these new criteria.If your writing is still grounded in the aesthetics of 1920s modernism, you are going to be scalded in reviews , at best considered “confused” or, worse, dismissed as outmoded, a bourgeois decadent. And if you refuse to bring your politics and aesthetics in line with the new realities, you can expect even harsher judgments : counter-revolutionary, fascist. Such was the approximate experience, oversimplified to be sure, of three of the four modernist poets in this study: Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, and William Carlos Williams.The fourth, Robert Frost, differed only in being a popular as well as critical success in the teens and twenties.1 All four felt the pressure of the times, of the politicized literary scene, and all four saw their reputations critically challenged in the early and mid thirties. This book examines the dynamics of their literary experience in the 1930s: what they wrote; what they believed politically and aesthetically;how critics,particularly leftist critics,reviewed their work;and, most important, how these poets responded to this leftist pressure and often negative criticism. None of these topics yields a fixed answer ; all—beliefs, poetry, reviews, literary standing, the poets’ responses to the pressure, and the pressure itself—were in flux, shifting and changing as the times and literary politics themselves changed over this turbulent decade. These four poets were chosen for several reasons.First,all four are major poets,whose work rewards close critical scrutiny.More important,all four reacted strongly in the 1930s to the juggernaut of leftism,2 whether expressed radically in communism or in the liberal New Deal, and to leftist demands for politically engaged poetry.All four wrote significant poems, even whole books of poems, in response to these pressures, as well as letters , essays, and lectures. In short, the leftist times and literary influence got under their skins more so than for other poets, for...

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