"US Poetry and the Politics of Form," by Sarah Ehlers

Coming out of this week's research on the question of "what is 'political' about literature in the American context?"* -- an interesting review of an interesting-looking book, on midcentury conservative criticisms of modernist poetics.

Counter-revolution of the Word:
The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960
By Alan Filreis
University of North Carolina Press, 2008, 422 pages, $40 cloth.

LAURA BUSH’S 2003 “Poetry and the American Voice” symposium is infamous because it never happened. Intended to be a White House celebration of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes, the event was cancelled when several poet-invitees (including former laureates) declined the invitation and, instead, composed poems protesting U.S. involvement in Iraq. When the symposium was called off, the First Lady’s spokesperson explained that a celebration of poets was in danger of being turned into a political event.

From one perspective, Alan Filreis’s important new book Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960 seems to unearth the variegated history producing the former First Lady’s public declaration that an event celebrating American poetry shouldn’t be “political.” Indeed Filreis describes a striking paradox: in the middle of the 20th-century, conservative critics decried experimental verse forms in an attempt to destroy the modernist avant-garde and to undo its associations with the Left. Yet by treating modern poetic experimentalism as a form of communist subversion, and by privileging a traditional lyricism defined by individual expression and reflection, it appears that these critics effectively convinced American audiences that poetry and politics don’t mix.

In this sense, Counter-revolution of the Word maps the creation of a notion that Laura Bush’s press corps had apparently internalized — that is, that American poetry should be distinct from politics. But Filreis also reveals how tangled poetry is and has been in U.S. politics, and his book’s specific focus on political re-narrations of poetic forms reveals the ways in which seemingly innocuous statements like Bush’s are actually the product of a long ideological antagonism ...

* I know ... if you have any suggestions for not-overly-technical readings that lay out ideas related to this topic in 5-15 pages I'll kiss you on your head