Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960

The Boston Review offers a review of a very intriguing book: Counter-Revolution of the Word:The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960, by Alan Filreis (Cloth, University of North Carolina Press, $40). The review is written by the noted LANGUAGE poet, Charles Bernstein.
Free verse

Counter-Revolution of the Word:The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960,
by Alan Filreis

Alan Filreis’s Counter-Revolution of the Word is less a work of literary interpretation than a penetrating historical and sociological study. It is comparable to now-classic books like Jed Rasula’s The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry, Robert Von Hallberg’s American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980, and Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory.

Against the grain of received history, Filreis, a colleague of mine at the University of Pennsylvania, reveals the deep engagement of many politically progressive poets of the 1930s with modernist poetic innovation. (The converse is also true: in an earlier book Filreis reads the putatively conservative Wallace Stevens within the socio-cultural context of the ’30s.) He also tracks a number of ’30s poets, showing the dire effect of McCarthyite redbaiting on their careers. However, his principal focus is on the conflation of anticommunism with antimodernism in the immediate postwar period. Such a conflation might seem counterintuitive, since the left is often associated with populist styles that reject modernist difficulty, while radical modernism is often associated with an aesthetic at odds with explicit left political content. But the toxic mix of what Filreis calls “anticommunist antimodernism” is not only pervasive in the 1950s, but also provides an ideological foundation for the official verse culture of the 1970s onward.

Filreis’s book is filled with telling examples of how the aesthetic and political right denounced non-conventional poetry as if it were a part of the Communist menace. Such poetry was smeared as unnatural and corrupting, as an affront to moral values as expressed in proper grammar, and, moreover, as foreign and therefore un-American. “The vocabulary of thirties-bashing was cast in the idiom of incurability; tropes of cancer and mass death abounded. Leftist writing of the 1930s was dismissed ‘in a phrase: it was an alien growth’ . . . ‘poison,’” while, by extension, modernist poetry was denounced as “barbarous dissonance” fomenting “death and decay.” Writing in The New York Times in 1949, influential art critic Howard Devree was already warning of the anxious conflation of Communism and modernism, noting both were feared to be “possessed of the devil and . . . dangerous to American culture and realism”:

Another curious, disconcerting and, in fact, frightening part of the new attack has been the tendency of the attackers to refer to modern art in practically the same terms used by Hitler and the Communist hierarchy. It is called ‘degenerate art,’ and there are thinly veiled accompanying demands for its suppression and for censorship.

Filreis is not alone in relating these images of the alien and nonhuman to the imagery of Don Siegel’s 1956 movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the charged postwar environment, the lyric became a symbol for anti-modernist resistance, clearly “identified with the postideological moment,” a bulwark against what Colonel Cullen Jones, in a 1951 article, “Abnormal Poets and Abnormal Poetry,” derided as modernist effeminacy and its “sexual abnormalities.” Jones may seem, in retrospect, a marginal figure, but according to the headnote in A. Stanton Coblentz’s 1945 collection The Music Makers: An Anthology of Recent American Poetry, he published thirty-five poems in 1944 in such widely circulated publications as The New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly and would certainly qualify as representative of the official verse culture of his time.

One thing the anticommunist antimodernists had right was that the poetic form of radical modernism was political; Filreis calls this the “cold war politics of poetic form.” A 1953 article by Donald Davidson targets parataxis in poetry—the juxtaposition of two images or units of sense that lack any immediately apparent connection—for its “treacherous political irresponsibility in the act of eschewing relations of cause and effect while the related elements [are] left to stand in unordered, unsubordinated lists.” Just a few years earlier, Robert Hillyer, in the widely circulated Saturday Review of Literature, assailed modernism in poetry as an “illusion of independent thought” and a “propaganda” machine of “the powers of darkness.” Writing in the Bulletin of the Poetry Society of America, Hillyer accused modernists of “a cold conformity of intellectualism” that eliminated “diversity” and insisted on “a critical censorship, in its effects like that of the Kremlin.”

Modernist poets were smeared as perpetuators of the “Big Lie” (that their work is really poetry), who, if they were to capture the free world, would enforce their worldview by means of “secret police, concentration camps, and execution squads,” in the words of Coblentz in 1950. Coblentz, a central figure in Filreis’s study, had been featured in The New York Times Magazine in 1946 with his article called “What Are They?—Poems or Puzzles?” In a later essay he cast modernism in the role of a “mosquito that sucks your blood,” a “parasite in the grain.” Images of purity versus degeneration abound. Consider Ben Lucien Burman’s “The Cult of Unintelligibility,” published in the November 1, 1952 issue of the Saturday Review. The influences of Gertrude Stein, Berman says, are “still to be found in many strategic strongholds, like the lurking germs of a yellow fever, they must be constantly fought and sprayed with violent chemicals lest the microbes develop again and start a new infection.”

Read the rest of this interesting review.

Hmmm . . . modernism as equivalent to communism. Who would of thought of that connection? It seems so naive from the vantage point of history.


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