RESEARCH General Arts

ENGLISH
Book focuses on poetry of American left and what can be learned from it

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

8/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — After a century of nearly complete scholarly silence about the poetry of the American left, scholars are now giving this revolutionary literature its due.

Leading the reassessment is Cary Nelson, whose new book, "Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left" (Routledge, 2001) is, he claims, the first "to give a broad account of this vital tradition and to ask why the poems have been so long suppressed and what we have to gain now by remembering them."

In addition to the essays on poets and their poetry, cast against the backdrop of history, the book offers 50 period engravings and woodcuts – song sheet covers, postcards, pages from the Daily Worker.

According to Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, the book pays particular attention to "the red decade" of the 1930s.

Many conservative critics find the poetry of that decade to be something of a scandal, Nelson said, "not only because of its politics but also because of its unusual aesthetics. Yet the 1930s aesthetic was a revelation – that poets could write individual poems designed to form a chorus of voices."

In his exploration of the poetry of the ’30s, Nelson showcases Edwin Rolfe (1909-1954), a poet, journalist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Rolfe began to focus on "the fragility and necessity of historical memory – on its key place in maintaining an informed and viable politics" – almost immediately upon returning from Spain in 1939. Of that war, seen as a triumph of internationalism and of selfless commitment to a true cause, Rolfe later wrote, "Even the day of defeat / Exalted us."

Nelson argues that biography is particularly important in the recovery of texts "outside the dominant cultures of writers writing in the 1930s, but not biography of the wholly private and idiosyncratic sort."

"Writers on the margins of American culture often live and work through [an] intense, sometimes anguished, relationship with the social, political, and subcultural realities of their time. What one encounters in their work is often a biographically inflected reaction to a subcultural experience of current history. Biography and history thus interact in a way that defines their enterprise."

In a chapter titled "Modern Poems We Have Wanted to Forget," Nelson traces a dozen writers' poetic outrage against poverty, abusive working conditions, warfare, racism and political witch hunting, among other injustices. He cites the beginning of George P. McIntyre's 1889 poem "America": "Want!" in a land of plenty– / "Want!" did I hear you say– / "Want!" in a land of harvests! / "Want?" in America?– / Great God! And is it then true, / That there is want in our streets to-day? / Gaunt want and wolfish hunger, / and cold, in America? "To read his poem more than one hundred years later," Nelson said, "is to credit disturbing continuities in American self-deception and to grant poetry a role in calling witness to the realities of our social life."