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Conclusion The preceding chapters document how four poets individually struggled with leftist pressures in the 1930s. But what do their stories tell us collectively about the vicissitudes of the modernist poet in the 1930s? The introduction asserts that,despite the obvious individuality of these four,what they experienced in the 1930s and how they responded to the political Left were not idiosyncratic but, when viewed comparatively, reveal patterns common to essentially apolitical poets in a political age. The introduction also raises questions about whether their engagement with leftist politics helped or hindered their poetry and about how their political poetry in the 1930s affected their poetry in the years following. Let us now consider these questions. PATTERNS AND DISCONTINUITIES Without question Stevens, Frost, Cummings, and Williams were deeply affected by the migrations of critics and writers to the Left, rather like celestial bodies yanked from their “normal” trajectories by the irresistible gravitational pull of an intrusive star—or a black hole. The disruption began in the early thirties (1930–33), in the enthusiastic first wave of writers, artists, and intellectuals moving leftward. None of the four poets actively joined this movement; in fact, their reactions to it varied considerably : Stevens seemed largely indifferent, while Williams was certainly interested—he even coedited a leftist journal in 1933 but continued to insist on the modernist aesthetics that had guided his poetry previously. Frost and Cummings both expressed deep skepticism of the new politics— Frost in the long pastoral “Build Soil,”which he provocatively read at Columbia University in 1932,Cummings in his Russian journal,Eimi, published a year later. These responses,however,did not appear in the poetry collections published by the four in the early thirties: Frost’s Collected Poems (1930), Stevens ’s second version of Harmonium (1931),Cummings’s ViVa (1931),and Williams’s Collected Poems,1921–1931 (1934).Comprised of poems nearly all written in the 1920s and earlier, these volumes appeared indifferent to the Depression and the new politics.But they were reviewed by critics—in particular the leftward-moving Granville Hicks,Isador Schneider,Horace 194 Conclusion Gregory,Raymond Larsson,Babette Deutsch,and Eda LouWalton—who were very much aware of the times and who concluded that these poets were essentially stuck in their 1920s styles and attitudes. It is important to note, however, that none of the leftist critics attacked these collections on explicitly political grounds; words like “bourgeois,” “confused,” and “counter-revolutionary” had not yet infiltrated poetic criticism. Rather, the critics tended to express their political attitudes as impatience and sometimes irritability that the poetry of these four had not significantly changed from the 1920s. Gregory’s critique of Stevens’s “highly polished surfaces”is typical,likewise Gorham Munson’s disenchantment with what he considered Cummings’s elitist obscurity.The leftist reviewers implied that these poets were growing stale and were increasingly irrelevant to the catastrophic times. It should be noted, also, that these negative critiques were intermingled with admiring ones (e.g.,the many positive reviews of Frost’s Collected Poems, and Walton’s praise of Stevens’s style). Thus, none of the four poets could justifiably complain that the negative reviews were obviously political. The second, large wave of leftist conversions crested in the mid-1930s. In the milieu of the News Deal’s pathbreaking social programs;the Popular Front against fascism and the resulting Communist appeals to bourgeois writers to join the Left (e.g., the communist-organized American Writers ’ Congress of 1935); the ubiquitous leftist sympathy for Loyalist Spain and the idealistic participation of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in that civil war, membership in leftist groups like the CPUSA swelled to a high point,while many thousands more chose to became fellow travelers.Writers of any political stripe would thus have found it virtually impossible in this period to ignore the steadily intensifying pressure to go left. Certainly , these four poets by now felt this pressure keenly and responded to it in their mid-thirties books of poetry:Stevens’s Ideas of Order (1935) and Owl’s Clover (1936), Cummings’s NoThanks (1935),Williams’s An Early Martyr (1935), Frost’s A Further Range (1936). Their political responses varied, of course, but the prominence of these responses did not. Stevens expressed a complex of attitudes which regretted that “Marx has ruined nature / For the moment” (“Botanist on Alp [No.1]”) and yet recognized that poetry must respond to and change with continually changing and ugly “reality”; in fact, Owl...

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