Winfield Townley Scott was more than a little appalled when he saw in
the work of the young and suddenly popular Australian poet John
Manifold an urge to "make frequent identifications for the individual
with general society" and wondered if such poetry was going to make a
resurgence among the young poets returning from the war.  That this
horrified Scott is the bitter subtext of what might easily have been
read as a polite, even cautiously encouraging, review.  At the very
beginning of the cold war, in 1946, Scott read Manifold's <i>Selected
Poems</i>, recognized Manifold's talent for making of poems "Guerilla
words," "declamation[s] in the crowded square," and then mounted an
extraordinarily disproportionate effort to characterize Manifold's
work as outmoded, immature, and by not so subtle implication foreign
to what American poets do.  "In his Marxist politics he relates
directly to the poetry of the 1930s," Scott wrote--and so is, at best,
quaintly vivacious "in favor of the underdog."  Moreover, Manifold's
political ballads "have the virtue of being indigenously Australian"
and, indeed, curious and primitive--apt for condescension: "There is
always in the deliberate primitive an antipathetic sophistication, and
such artless art commits suicide."  Manifold's poems can be enjoyed
because, with his "drive" and "gusto" to make clear his poetry ideal,
he can be thought of as very unlike us.
     Clearly, the making of the fifties' thirties was getting underway
as early as 1946, and Scott was hardly alone in rigidifying
definitions of what was to be despised about the thirties.  In the
same year as Scott categorized Manifold as a primitivist antifascist
poet born too late, William Meredith was describing Norman Rosten's
political poetry as "poster-writing" that "evoked a <i>primary
response</i>."  Why the radicals' use of "blank and free verse [that]
read like a shopping list" (by which Meredith meant something quite
poetically deficient) "evoked a primary response" while what Meredith
and his colleagues were now doing presumably evoked something more
complex, more sophisticated--less animal and more human--is
necessarily left unsaid.  Then there was "the omission of articles and
an excessive use of participles"--all quite unnatural--and, worst of
all, "words and phrases connected by commas where conjunctions are
wanted" and "clauses and sentences joined by conjunctions where
periods and a breath of air are needed."  Meredith made it very clear
in criticizing Rosten's ambitious book about the building of the Alcan
Highway, <i>The Big Road</i> (1946), that there was a specific
connection between, on the one hand, radical poetry written before the
war, "in which political ideas were presented in a simplified form"
and "advanced causes important to poets and free men" and, on the
other, these particular syntactical failures.  There was no effort,
here or elsewhere in anticommunist poetry criticism, to counter-
theorize the politics of form.  Simply an acceptance of the idea that
omitted articles and conjunctions in lieu of full stops represented
"shortcomings," "a real carelessness with regard to the sound of the
verse."  If postwar readers of Poetry were to agree that "Mr. Rosten's
book would be more <I>readable</i> if it were better poetry," Meredith
nonetheless leaves them to assume what that more "readable" poetry
would be, except to say that it would have "the form, the precision
and the scope of art."  Here is an aesthetic for the postwar period
coming into existence in reaction against something the hatred of
which could now be culturally sanctioned and be left unmentioned as
such. This was much more powerful than if Meredith had felt the
oblibation to spell out the emerging counteraesthetic.  He claimed
that "[t]he issue here is not intelligibility vs. obscurity, or
popular as against private poetry," but he was protesting too much. 
These were exactly the issues.  The political poetry that had come
before had deliberately engaged popular forms and low-cultural
diction, and would now be made to pay for that descent below the
proper station of poetry.  That's why Meredith used the phrase "the
scope of art"; he and others were engaged in the work of re-narrowing
that scope that had been widened first by modernists in the teens and
twenties and then by radicals in the thirties--both movements, though
very differently, had urged that nothing be considered in itself not
the material of poetry.  But now Rosten's verse, and that of many
others, would fall outside the proper scope, since, for one thing, "it
has...[a] catchy design [and] the crude color of a poster," qualities
that have all to do with the key questions of intellgibility and
obscurity.  Meredith's logic in 1946 was exactly that of much poetry
criticism in the anticommunist period through 1960: claimed to dislike
what the poster said and how it said it, but really the crudity lay in
the very use of poetry as a poster.  The most effective way of burying
the prewar period was to attack the forms; then one couldn't be
accused of mere disagreement with the content, but nonetheless the
content would be contradicted once the forms had fallen.