Author: Cary Nelson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252061790
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description

Author: Edwin Rolfe
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252066405
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This long-overdue collection, which gathers together more than two hundred poems written over a span of six decades, along with an extended biographical analysis by Fred Whitehead, permits a comprehensive assessment of the work of a man Thomas McGrath described as "one of the very best of the revolutionary poets." Don Gordon made his name in the 1930s as a passionate and outspoken political poet, his work being published in the most prestigious American journals. In spite of his growing literary reputation he was called before the Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. House or Representatives in September, 1951. Due to his openly communist views and his reluctance to give the committee names of fellow radical writers, Gordon was blacklisted from employment in the film industry. He devoted his time to writing poems, despite the difficulty of finding a wide audience for them. Many of Gordon's poems are suffused with themes of revolution and political activism, but this collection showcases the breadth of the subjects he addressed in his sixty years of writing, expressed with a rigorous aesthetic sensibility in a style that incorporates diverse influences, including modernism and surrealism. "Don Gordon is great," Meridel LeSueur wrote, "because he shows the vigorous and wondrous strength of the people." With this complete collection of his poems, readers can at last experience the full range of this vigorous and challenging writer.

Author: Alan M. Wald
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859840016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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In this collection of essays, the author combines a series of assessments of "classic" and "lost" texts in the US Marxist literary tradition, and analyzes developments in Marxist scholarship by Robin Kelley, Michael Lowy, James Murphy, Paula Rabinowitz and Alexander Saxton.

Author: Cary Nelson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252070709
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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When the United States and other powers declined to help fight fascist power at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, forty thousand private citizens from fifty-two countries rallied to join the International Brigade's defense of the Spanish Republic. Born out of the struggle between fascism and democracy and considered the first battle of World War II, the Spanish Civil War holds tremendous ideological significance and has inspired a remarkable range of American poetry. The Wound and the Dream represents the sixty-year tradition of American poetic responses to the Spanish Civil War and provides an overview of progressive American poetry as a whole. Four of the featured poets--Alvah Bessie, William Lindsay Gresham, James Neugass, and Edwin Rolfe--were members of the International Brigade. Their poetry appears alongside lesser-known works by some of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, including Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, and Philip Levine. Cary Nelson's introduction discusses the collective nature of the poems, puts them in their international context, and provides a sturdy framework for interpreting the Spanish Civil War as a historical conjecture that has dramatically altered the ways we read and write poetry. The book also includes a brief biography of each poet and a glossary of related terms.

Author: Edwin Rolfe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781494092894
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
This is a new release of the original 1939 edition.

Author: Michael Thurston
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807875007
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
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.

Author: Walter Kalaidjian
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801882311
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Explores American poetry on genocide, the Holocaust, and total war, as well as on postwar social antagonisms, racial oppression, and domestic violence. Combining Psychoanalytic theory and cultural studies, this account of modern poetics analyzes the ways in which literary form gives testimony to the trauma of twentieth-century history.

Author: Cary Nelson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135310157
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Revolutionary Memory is the most important book yet to be published about the vital tradition of leftwing American Poetry. As Cary Nelson shows, it is not only our image of the past but also our sense of the present and future that changes when we recover these revolutionary memories. Making a forceful case for political poetry as poetry, Nelson brings to bear his extraordinary knowledge of American poets, radical movements, and social struggles in order to bring out an undervalued strength in a literature often left at the canon's edge. Focused in part of the red decade of the 1930s, Revolutionary Memory revitalizes biographical criticism for writers on the margin and shows us for the first time how progressive poets fused their work into a powerful chorus of political voices. Richly detailed and beautifully illustrated with period engravings and woodcuts, Revolutionary Memory brings that chorus dramatically to life and set a cultural agenda for future work.

Author: Todd Vogel
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813530055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The Black Press progresses chronologically from abolitionist newspapers to today's Internet and reveals how the black press's content and its very form changed with evolving historical conditions in America.

Author: Bill Mohr
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609380738
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This book examines the evolution of contemporary American poetry in Los Angeles, California.