Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics, and: Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars (review)

Michael Thurston takes his title from W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats": "For poetry makes nothing happen." John Beck shares Thurston's belief that the artist is not "a disinterested observer but . . . a participating agent in the production of . . . history and culture" (1). Auden rejected the notion that poetry could be an agent of change, a cause rather than an effect of history, arguing that the poet is "a man of action [only in] the field of language." For Auden, we err when we ask poets to give answers to the problems that beset us; all we can expect is that they retain the power to respond to their world. In contrast, both Writing the Radical Center and Making Something Happen judge their subjects by the answers they give to such problems as social inequality, the dehumanizing forces of capitalism, and the failures of liberal democracy.

Beck charts Dewey's and Williams's respective efforts to found a democratic poetry and society. Although he makes a convincing case that both poets believe that creative and intellectual activity is a social act, he evaluates Williams according to the yardstick of the social philosopher. When read as cultural critics, both Dewey and Williams fall short of a radical critique of capitalism, but why read Williams for a critique of capitalism?

Beck is on much surer ground when writing of Dewey's belief that "democracy begins with the aesthetic. The interaction or communication between the self and the world is a way of becoming included, of connecting. The experience of connection is aesthetic inasmuch as it constitutes a realization of formal, relational union" (160). Chapter 1 explores "Dewey's language of democracy" and faith in community alongside Williams's notions of the poet and society. Subsequent chapters cover their views on the role of art in democratic society, their organicist notions of experience, and their meliorist rather than revolutionary visions of social change. Beck concludes with a reading of Paterson as a democratic epic.

There is much value in Beck's discussion of Dewey's theories of art, education, and society and in the links he makes to Williams's efforts to articulate an American poetics, but his notion of community leads him to mischaracterize Williams's poetics as organic and his vision of society as a work of art. Beck misses the antimetaphysical dimension of Williams's poetics and dismisses Paterson, "Book Five," with its metapoetic examination of the unicorn tapestries, as a retreat into aestheticism, whereas it should be read as a critique of aesthetics as the unification of language and experience.

Thurston's study also aims to contextualize his subjects, yet his work proves to be oddly traditional, relying as it does on formalist literary analysis to prove that poetry makes something happen. But how do we locate the results? What did political poetry of the interwar years make happen? Did Edwin Rolfe convince readers to join in the defense of the Spanish republic? Was Langston Hughes's belief that race would disappear after the workers' revolution adopted by labor organizers? Did anyone ever become a fascist, or a patriot, by reading Ezra Pound's Adams cantos? Did Muriel Rukeyser change labor and workers' rights laws by publishing The Book of the Dead? Although Thurston allows that poetry "cannot directly effect change in history" but acts in mediated ways, this still leaves open the question, What did this poetry make happen?

Thurston insists that art must succeed as art in order to do something. "A successful poem...