Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars

by Michael Thurston

Overview

Poetry makes nothing happen," wrote W. H. Auden in 1939, expressing a belief that came to dominate American literary institutions in the late 1940s--the idea that good poetry cannot, and should not, be politically engaged. By contrast, Michael Thurston here looks back to the 1920s and 1930s to a generation of poets who wrote with the precise hope and the deep conviction that they would move their audiences to action. He offers an engaging new look at the political poetry of Edwin Rolfe, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, and Muriel Rukeyser.

Thurston combines close textual reading of the poems with research into their historical context to reveal how these four poets deployed the resources of tradition and experimentation to contest and redefine political common sense. In the process, he demonstrates that the aesthetic censure under which much partisan writing has labored needs dramatic revision. Although each of these poets worked with different forms and toward different ends, Thurston shows that their strategies succeed as poetry. He argues that partisan poetry demands reflection not only on how we evaluate poems but also on what we value in poems and, therefore, which poems we elevate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807875001
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	01/14/2003
Series:	Cultural Studies of the United States
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Michael Thurston is assistant professor of English at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

Making Something Happen

Not so very long ago, there lived a poet whom we'll call E. Brought up in a city in the eastern United States, E. decided early on that he would be a poet. He wrote poems while in high school, studied literature and languages, set out to learn from "the tradition" and then supersede it. After experiencing difficulties both in his work life and in his poetic career, E. enjoyed some success with books published by small presses his friends operated. Renowned in the limited circles in which he moved, E. became something of an arbiter of literary quality. He published criticism and, indeed, tried to define the terms by which new poetry should be judged. But his effort to devote wholehearted attention to matters literary was made difficult by events in the extraliterary world. The worldwide financial depression of the 1930s deepened his already intense interest in politics, and E. spent much of his energy working for political causes, both as a writer and in other capacities. When hostilities broke out between Fascists and leftists in several European countries, E. dedicated himself to the defense of a European country to which he had grown intensely attached. He wrote poems about the country and its troubles, he wrote journalistic articles about it, he wrote letters to officials expressing his concern over events and their significance, he wrote and delivered radio speeches. He opposed the United States, his native country, in his devotion to something he saw as larger than national loyalties. These activities, once the war was over, got him into trouble at home, trouble with the law and trouble with parts of the literary establishment, in which his poems were no longer welcome.

E., of course, is Ezra Pound (1885-1971).[1] Brought up in Philadelphia, educated in languages at Hamilton College and the University of Pennsylvania, fired from his first teaching job at Wabash College, Pound published his first book himself and through the 1920s depended on the presses of his friends and acquaintances. A forceful critical intellect and a shrewd judge of new poetry, Pound made himself the center of poetic modernism (a term he did not use himself) and helped construct the framework through which we still read the poets for whom he proselytized. Interested since the early 1910s in economics and history, Pound devoted himself to these and to political efforts during the 1930s, and when war grew increasingly imminent in Europe and he saw his beloved Italy threatened, he took up verbal arms in poetry, in prose, and on the radio. The difficulties these activities brought him are famous: an outdoor prison cell in Pisa, a controversial Bollingen Prize in 1949, and thirteen years in St. Elizabeth's Hospital.

But E. is also Edwin Rolfe, the Communist writer and unofficial poet laureate of the Spanish Civil War's Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Born in Philadelphia in 1909, briefly educated at the University of Wisconsin's Experimental College, Rolfe was called to poetry early on. Indeed, he took the pseudonym Edwin Rolfe only after being forbidden to publish any more poems in his high school newspaper. Rolfe spent most of his life in New York, moving in 1943 to California, where he lived until his death in 1954.[2] Throughout the 1930s and for scattered periods later in his life, Rolfe worked as a writer, taking jobs with the Daily Worker, Sport and Play, the Furniture Workers Industrial Union's Furniture Worker, the New Masses, Action: Magazine for Jewish Masses, and the Partisan Review, on whose editorial board Rolfe served in the magazine's early years. More important, he also wrote poems, publishing some in the publications he worked for and some in Poetry, Pagany, and the New York Times. His first book, To My Contemporaries, inaugurated his friend, Sol Funaroff's, Dynamo Press poetry series.

A member of the Young Communist League even in high school, Rolfe throughout his life was interested in Marxist economics and politics. He participated in union and party activities in various roles. When the Spanish army, led by General Francisco Franco, rebelled against the Popular Front coalition government, Rolfe answered the party's call for soldiers in the International Brigades. In Spain, he edited Volunteer for Liberty, the brigades' English-language magazine; gave talks on Radio Madrid; and coordinated troop movements. He fought in the Ebro offensive, the International Brigades' last in the war. Upon his return from Spain, Rolfe—a "premature antifascist"—was barred from combat service in the U.S. Army during World War II, denied screenwriting employment in Hollywood, and called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Rolfe worked for Tass, the Soviet news agency; wrote a history of the Lincoln Brigade; and collaborated on documentary film projects and a novel, The Glass Room. It became so difficult for him to publish his poems that he brought out his second book, First Love and Other Poems (1951), in an edition of just 375 copies at his own expense.[3] In fact, Rolfe's last two books of poetry, First Love and Other Poems and Permit Me Refuge, were published during the early 1950s, at the height of the postwar anti-Communist inquisition, the last posthumously. The books, as Allen Guttmann has remarked, suffered under the inquisition, coming out at a moment when the political commitments registered in the poems were cause for public humiliation and criminal prosecution (264). Rolfe died of a heart attack on May 24, 1954.

Similar stories, Pound's and Rolfe's, but one of them we have heard before, whereas the other has all but disappeared from literary history.[4] There are many reasons for this. Pound wrote a great deal more than Rolfe did; his cantos alone triple Rolfe's entire poetic output. Pound was a central agent in literary movements at the heart of most histories of twentieth-century poetry, while Rolfe was a peripheral figure, writing in and for an audience that, though not much smaller than Pound's intended audience, was much less influential and culturally central. And Pound was, by most standards of literary judgment, a much more gifted and accomplished poet. But these standards of centrality and quality are themselves bound up with an assumption, or a set of assumptions, about poetry captured in W. H. Auden's famous shorthand: "[P]oetry makes nothing happen."

Auden's assertion is one of the most famous in modern poetry, as familiar and oft-repeated as "April is the cruelest month" or "Death is the mother of beauty." Like those lines, it has become a shibboleth. Through its repetition, it has engraved itself as an inscription or an epitaph. The latter, of course, is the most appropriate association, for the line occurs midway through what might be the most famous elegy in modern English poetry, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats." More than this, the pronouncement effectively inters the view shared by many poets throughout the 1930s that poetry could, quite directly and concretely, make something happen.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Making Something Happen
1 Tradition and the Political Poet: Edwin Rolfe
2 All Together, Black and White: Langston Hughes
3 Getting the Goofs to Listen: Ezra Pound
4 Extending the Document: Muriel Rukeyser
Conclusion: The Age Demanded
Notes
Works Cited
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

The readings of interwar American activist poetry offered here are detailed and interesting, combining research into the poets' other political activities.—Virginia Quarterly Review



Highly informative.—Choice



By offering a truly culturally informed close reading of American political poetry, Thurston's book makes many important things happen: he opens up what we mean by 'political poetry,' he reshapes literary categories such as 'modernism,' and he offers a wonderfully readable example of the best sort of mix of literary history, literary criticism, and cultural studies. His clarity and engagement challenge contemporary criticism.—Carla Kaplan, University of Southern California



Making Something Happen breaks with earlier studies that have tended to segregate poets on the left from those on the extreme right. Examining the formal conventions of traditional English lyricism and experimental modernism, Michael Thurston makes a strong case for poetry's social agency across the divide of modernist political culture.—Walter Kalaidjian, Emory University

Editorial Reviews

By offering a truly culturally informed close reading of American political poetry, Thurston's book makes many important things happen: he opens up what we mean by 'political poetry, ' he reshapes literary categories such as 'modernism, ' and he offers a wonderfully readable example of the best sort of mix of literary history, literary criticism, and cultural studies.

Carla Kaplan

Examining the formal conventions of traditional English lyricism and experimental modernism, Michael Thurston makes a strong case for poetry's social agency across the divide of modernist political culture.

Walter Kalaidjian

By offering a truly culturally informed close reading of American political poetry, Thurston's book makes "many" important things happen: he opens up what we mean by 'political poetry, ' he reshapes literary categories such as 'modernism, ' and he offers a wonderfully readable example of the best sort of mix of literary history, literary criticism, and cultural studies. (Carla Kaplan, University of Southern California)

Examining the formal conventions of traditional English lyricism and experimental modernism, Michael Thurston makes a strong case for poetry's social agency across the divide of modernist political culture. (Walter Kalaidjian, Emory University)

From the Publisher