| Description |
1 online resource (xxiii, 422 pages) : illustrations |
| Contents |
I: The fifties' thirties -- Better rethink your aesthetics -- The revolt against revolt -- Guilty are those who are punished -- Repressive rereadings -- An underground of the unpublishable -- Anti-anticommunist poetics -- II: Anticommunist antimodernism -- Poetry in the hour of need -- Invasion of the modernists -- Deep pinks, medium pinks, door openers -- Hard times in Xanadu -- Lyricism, freedom, and art education -- Formlessness is Godlessness -- The good grammar of citizenship |
| Summary |
This book examines the story of the coalition of poets, editors, and politicians who, after the Cold War, attempted to discredit--if not destroy--the American modernist avant-garde. Ideologically diverse, yet willing to bespeak their hatred of modern poetry through the rhetoric of anticommunism, these "anticommunist antimodernists," joined associations such as the League for Sanity in Poetry to decry the modernist "conspiracy" against form and language. The author argues that although the antimodernists expressed their disapproval through ideological language, their hatred of experimental poetry was ultimately not political but aesthetic. He shows that an informal network of antimodernists was effective in suppressing or distorting the postwar careers of many poets whose work had appeared regularly in the 1930s. Insofar as modernism had consorted with radicalism in the Red Decade, antimodernists in the 1950s worked to sever those connections, fantasized a formal and unpolitical pre-Depression High Modern moment, and assiduously sought to de-radicalize the remnant avant-garde |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
American poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism
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Politics and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century
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Conservatism and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century
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Modernism (Literature) -- United States
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POETRY -- American -- General.
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American poetry
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Conservatism and literature
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Modernism (Literature)
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Politics and literature
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Lyrik
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Konservativismus
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Amerikansk poesi -- 1900-talet.
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Modernism (litteratur) -- Förenta Staterna.
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Litteratur och politik -- historia -- Förenta staterna -- 1900-talet.
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United States
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USA
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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History
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9781469606637 |
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1469606631 |
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