Counter-Revolution of the Word

Counter-revolution of the Word is about conservatives' attempt to destroy the modernist avant-garde in the anticommunist period after World War II. The antagonists readers will meet in these pages by no means constitute a monolithic force. They were not ideologically of a kind. But aesthetically. Well, yes, aesthetically they were more or less unified; they knew what they formally opposed, and the narrative of that surprising unity lies at the center of this study. A few of these people did work together, such as the band of poets and poetry editors - most of them reactionary antimodernists - that the prolific Stanton Coblentz helped assemble under the banner of the League for Sanity in Poetry. Others among Coblentz's colleagues, however, would not have recognized themselves as allies; quite aside from their hatred of modern poetry, differences between them - academic, theoretical, personal - would have gotten in the way. To my knowledge, this is the first book written about the overall effects of actual anticommunism on modernist American poetry and poetics. Such a blank in our understanding of American art and artists has its specific causes. A main cause is the apparent disappearance of the evidence for links between and among disparate, truculent McCarthyite elements in the poetry world and their ''communist poet'' enemies and the modernist experimenters who have not been known to have connections to the communist movement.