Modernism From Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism By Alan Filreis. Cambridge University Press, 1994. 376 pp. $49.95 cloth.
The literary 1930s have traditionally been viewed in terms of the
artists' and critics' flirtation, disenchantment with, and/or rejection of
radical politics. On the other hand, Modernists, though their careers
generally spanned the thirties, are typically discussed in terms of
conservative politics and classicist aesthetics. Only recently have
scholars begun to pay attention to what should have been an obvious
overlap between the two. Alan Filreis's Modernism from Right to
Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism is
excellent work in that vein--required reading for anyone interested in
the
mesh of literature and politics in the 1930s as well as for anyone willing
to see Modernist art as actively connected to the hubbub of its time.
Filreis not only thoroughly describes and analyzes the literary milieu of
the period, but he marshals evidence to show that Wallace Stevens, though
ensconced in the executive suites of the insurance industry, wrote his
poetry in contact with that milieu. In Filreis's words, "The interaction
. . . between noncommunists like Stevens and the literary-political forces
of their time--forces set routinely into motion by journal editors, poets,
and especially reviewers--was remarkably dynamic." This is New Historicism
fulfilling much of its promise, and Filreis does it without bogging his
book in jargon. As a result, his work is accessible to almost anyone
seeking help with Stevens' poems from the thirties. The final chapter,
for instance, offers a particularly detailed and coherent analysis of "The
Man with the Blue Guitar," viewing the poem as Stevens' attempt to answer
even as it absorbs and digests much of the criticism of his work by the
left.
In short, though narrow in its scope, Filreis's book is a worthy addition to scholarship--James Longenbach's Wallace Stevens: the Plain Sense of Things and Frank Lentricchia's Modernist Quartet come to mind--attempting to historicize Stevens' achievement and to rethink a turbulent literary era.
--Robert Donahoo
Document URL:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Stevens/texas-review.html
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modified: Saturday, 03-Jan-1998 22:08:49 EST