000 02574cam 22003378a 4500
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008 941109s1994 enka b 001 0 eng
010 $a93033404
020 $a0521453844
035 $a10891962
040 $aDLC$cDLC$dNGU$dOrLoB-B
043 $an-us---
049 $aOREU$lbna
050 $aPS3537.T4753$bZ635 1994
050 00 $aPS3537.T4753$bZ635 1994
082 00 $a811/.52$220
100 1 $aFilreis, Alan,$d1956-
245 10 $aModernism from right to left :$bWallace Stevens,
the thirties & literary radicalism /$cAlan Filreis.
260 $aCambridge ;$aNew York :$bCambridge University
Press,$c1994.
263 $a9407.
300 $axiv, 376 p. :$bill. ;$c24 cm.
440 0 $aCambridge studies in American literature and
culture ;$v79.
504 $aIncludes bibliographical references (p. 291-365)
and index.
520 $aPart biography and part literary history, this
book is about the experience of the American modernist poet
Wallace Stevens in the 1930s. Stevens is generally thought
to have antagonized, even enraged, the young literary
radicals of the period; his long poem, "Owl's Clover," has
been generally understood as a negative, even bitter
response to leftist aesthetics. Using the archives of many
little-known political poets, Alan Filreis offers a detailed
description of various literary-political battles, in which
the very texture of the positions taken up in the movement
between left and right becomes available to us in the
language of the participants. Filreis demonstrates that
radicals knew and appreciated modernism more than has been
recognized, and that Stevens's poetry - as well as that of
other then-eminent modernists - was significantly influenced
by poets and critics on the Left. Modernism from Right to
Left shows that the interactions between eminent modernists
- Stevens, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams - and
upstart radicals - Stanley Burnshaw, T.C. Wilson, Ruth
Lechlitner, Kenneth Fearing, Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Maas,
and others - were far more dynamic than has been
acknowledged during and beyond the eras of anticommunism.
This book is a contribution to the cultural history of the
American 1930s as well as a novel approach to an oft-studied
figure.
600 10 $aStevens, Wallace,$d1879-1955$xPolitical and
social views.
650 0 $aAmerican poetry$y20th century$xHistory and
criticism.
650 0 $aPolitical poetry, American$xHistory and
criticism.
650 0 $aModernism (Literature)$zUnited States.
650 0 $aRadicalism in literature.
907 $b18208307
