For anticommunist liberals American poetry in the 1950s had become a
hold of freedom--a deep-seated separate peace; like the self itself
(per then-dominant theories of the self), it was a site that could
neither be pierced nor violated by nasty political force.  Whereas
other expressive forms might be more easily transgressed and overtaken
by ideological coercion that threatened the world itself--like the
novel, and drama, and film, and the lyrics of popular music for youth,
and commerical advertisements, and comic books, and university
scholarship, and book reviews, and all manner of journalistic
discourse--on the other hand, poetry (by which these critics meant,
almost inevitably, the short modern lyric that had become so
formulaic) remained a sacred untouched and untouchable place.  It was
for a preserve for individualists and individuals, for quietness and
reflection, like Frost's woods except that the setting need not at all
be pastoral, and the rhetoric need not be natural--a haven where
politics, so exhausting, could find no proper place.  In 1951 Alfred
Kazin wrote generally about drama that it does no less than to
"concentrate for us those genuinely dialectical conflicts within
society which in our pressing concern with survival we now tend to put
at the back of our consciousness."  But poetry?  "[P]oetry," wrote
Kazin, "reminds us of the inviolable dignity of contemplation once
offered by the faithful practice of a religion"--a modernist
formulation lifted unimaginatively from Santayana and Stevens. In the
1930s, as in the 1950s, this was the dominant conception of poetry's
function in the United States, held by people, I mean, who did not
think much about actual poems or themselves read much modern poetry
written before the war.  This is an attitude familiar to us generally-
-poetry is fragile; a form of belief; don't touch it too rudely else
it'll break--but my point here is that in the fifties, unlike the
thirties, this was also to some degree the conception shared by a
great many critics of poetry, by Americans who read and knew living
poets, and in surprising measure by poets themselves.  They implicitly
called us to a bastion of "personal" liberty, which is to say
implicitly were taking a political position about the way culture
serves a nation, while also calling us to the spiritual settlement of
home and to "maturity," which is to say, again, that they had
political ideas about poetry's relation to public discourse.  And so
they provided a place untouched--sometimes so overtly that poetry
seemed just another fall-out shelter, only without the kitschy
trappings (cans of soup, Spam).  This was not merely a way in which
poets and poetry critics could claim to be again "in touch" with what
Americans think and want, could reconcile with their culture, having
repudiated it earlier.  Many wanted to conform to official majority
American opinion--which entailed, often, excoriating those modernists
and radicals who during twenty or forty years of treason had willfully
alienated "the average American" by antipathetic, unAmerican
attitudes.  Thus poetry's coming home in the fifties was also an
effective way in which poetry could participate in the cold war by
indeed creating a form uncontaminated by politics altogether.  And
then there were a number of poets, many now unread and some coming
into prominence only four decades later, who resisted the trend.  This
book, then, describes and examines anticommunist and anti-
anticommunist culture by way of claims made for and against what Kazin
praised as the "inviolable dignity" of American poetry.  It is also,
thus, a book about how in the late forties and fifties poets and their
readers, in order to preserve their inviolate place, had first to lump
radicals and modernists together and then to repudiate the thirties
and then to love the fifties as original and self-invented rather than
constructed in reaction against the thirties--and how this thirties-
bashing strategy, far from freeing them from cold war, only implicated
them still further in nationalist rhetoric.  One effect of this was to
implicate aesthetic isms set up against the thirties, such as
"modernism" as the fifties came conveniently to redefine it, in the
same nationalist rhetoric.  Thus both modernism and radicalism in
modern poetry, as those literary-historical categories passed through
the fifties, were altered in such a way as to make it difficult in the
following thirty years to see back through the distorting lens of the
cold war to an earlier period without merely repeating cold-war
assumptions.<p>
     Who resisted this?  Some avant gardists did and some left-wingers
did. And, interestingly, some reactionaries did.  Leaving
reactionaries aside just for the moment (for I will have much to say
about them), we see that avant gardists and leftists made a
sufficiently odd pair, it might seem, but then again the pairing was
made by their liberal and conservative anticommunist detractors.  Some
of the leftist poets during the late forties and fifties were
themselves dedicated avant gardists, and many in the poetic avant
garde were communists or anti-anticommunists.  I am particularly,
though by no means exclusively, interested in the convergence of these
two thrown-together enemies of the state.