[New-Poetry] The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960

[jforjames at aol.com]

http://bostonreview.net/BR33.4/bernstein.php


Counter-Revolution of the Word:The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960
Alan Filreis
University of North Carolina Press, $40 (cloth)
 
Charles Bernstein
 
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 cont
ent. 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.

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