Poetry, politics & culture : argument in the work of Eliot, Pound, Stevens & Williams

A salient feature of modern poetics is its direct connection with cultural history and politics. Among the great American poets of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams offer a significant contrast with T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Where the latter advocated a theocentric or reactionary response to the cultural crises of modernity, the former affirmed an essentially humanist and democratic social and aesthetic ethos. In Poetry, Politics, and Culture, Harold Kaplan offers a penetrating comparative study of these representative and distinctively influential poets. All four poets wrote in an atmosphere of cultural crisis following World War I, caught as they were between outmoded belief systems and various forms of artistic and political nihilism. While each believed in poetry as a source of cultural values and beliefs, they nevertheless experienced loss of confidence in their own vocation in a world characterized by scientific, rationalist thinking and the mundane struggle for survival. For each, therefore, the poetic imagination was a means of restoring order, or building a new civilization out of chaos. In trying to define a revitalized culture, the four exemplified the perennial quarrel between Europe and America. The first two became expatriates, seeking an escape from alienation by grounding poetic imagination and practice in forms of European tradition. For Eliot, culture meant the ordering metaphysics and institutions of the Church, while Pound's attempt to counter disorder led him to embrace Italian fascism. By contrast, Kaplan shows that Stevens and Williams, following Emerson and Thoreau, evolved a poetics that opposed the notion of cultural hierarchy and the fallen nature of man. As Kaplan makes clear, the problems that confronted these poets closely parallel the terms and conflicts of cultural issues at the forefront of contemporary political debate. "Poetry, Politics, and Culture" will be of interest to literary historians and critics, American studies specialists, and intellectual historians.