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Modernism (Literature)--United States, American poetry--20th century--History and criticism, Politics and literature--United States--History--20th century, and Conservatism and literature--United States--History--20th century

During the Cold War an unlikely coalition of poets, editors, and politicians converged in an attempt 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,'as Alan Filreis dubs them, joined associations such as the League for Sanity in Poetry to decry the modernist'conspiracy'against form and language. In Counter-revolution of the Word Filreis narrates the story of this movement and assesses its effect on American poetry and poetics.Although the antimodernists expressed their disapproval through ideological language, their hatred of experimental poetry was ultimately not political but aesthetic, Filreis argues. By analyzing correspondence, decoding pseudonyms, drawing new connections through the archives, and conducting interviews, Filreis 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. Filreis's analysis provides new insight into why experimental poetry has aroused such fear and alarm among American conservatives.

English poetry--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism and English poetry--Roman influences

The almost universal adulation given Edmund Waller in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries -- an adulation which, often as not, attached to his reform of poetry -- has been commonly accepted with little question of the grounds on which it is based. In this essay Alexander Ward Allison presents for the first time a specific analysis of the changes from Jacobean modes which Waller made, suggesting in the course of his analysis that the seventeenth century saw not a dissociation of sensibility, but rather a new fusion, of which Waller is a type.By a careful and detailed reading of the poems, Mr. Allison shows how Waller, writing in the genre of occasional verse, replaced the rational, ethical, direct Jacobean mode with a tone of geniality and personal detachment supported by an easy association of ideas and images. The same examination reveals how Waller elevated his diction and how, under the influence of Fairfax, he continued the'sweet'tradition of Spenser in his smoothly modulated metric.That to neoclassical poets Waller constituted a paragon is evident from their sometimes excessive praise; that he is one indeed is demonstrated by Allison with a style which enjoys an Augustan nicety.

Poetics, Knowledge, Theory of, in literature, Literary form, English poetry--20th century--History and criticism, Aesthetics, Modern--19th century, English poetry--19th century--History and criticism, American poetry--20th century--History and criticism, and American poetry--19th century--History and criticism

What is form? Why does form matter? In this imaginative and ambitious study, Angela Leighton assesses not only the legacy of Victorian aestheticism, and its richly resourceful keyword,'form', but also the very nature of the literary. She shows how writers, for two centuries and more, have returned to the idea of form as something which contains the secret of art itself. She tracks the development of the word from the Romantics to contemporary poets, and offers close readings of, among others, Tennyson, Pater, Woolf, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath, to show how form has provided the single most important way of accounting for the movements of literary language itself. She investigates, for instance, the old debate of form and content, of form as music or sound-shape, as the ghostly dynamic and dynamics of a text, as well as its long association with the aestheticist principle of being'for nothing'. In a wide-ranging and inventive argument, she suggests that form is the key to the pleasure of the literary text, and that that pleasure is part of what literary criticism itself needs to answer and convey.