Abstract
In the early decades of modernist studies, there was some agreement that Ezra Pound was a central figure of the discipline. When it appeared in 1971, the title of Hugh Kenner’s seminal modernist survey The Pound Era might as well have been referring to this academic consensus as well as to its ostensible early twentieth-century subject. Even critics who were fundamentally opposed to Pound’s aesthetic, such as F. R. Leavis, had to confront his example whenever they held forth on modern verse (as Leavis did in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) where, predictably, he was keen to stress that Pound’s importance was secondary to T. S. Eliot’s). But in recent years, Pound’s currency in discussions of modernism – if not, perhaps, modernist poetry – has dwindled. While Joyce, Woolf and Eliot support academic mega-industries and are mainstays of undergraduate curricula, Pound is a somewhat more marginal figure: relevant, certainly, but no longer essential.
Part of the reason why Pound has become a problematic figure is, of course, down to politics. Pound’s fascism and anti-semitism are impossible to excuse and difficult to see beyond (unlike, it would seem, Eliot’s racism or Woolf’s classism). And, indeed, the mere fact that politics and economics feature so prominently in Pound’s writing can make him an indigestible subject in an era that tends to approach ideology from the point of view of authorial identity.
With this in mind, it is appropriate that a full-throttle political reading of Pound is at the core of Mark Steven’s Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism, surely the most significant intervention in the field since The Pound Era. Picking up on the path-breaking revisionism of Ruth Jennison’s The Zukofsky Era (2012), Steven’s audacious redefinition of modernist historiography ventures much further than previous attempts to read political inferences into post-imagist poetry (for example, Peter Nicholls’s Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (1984) or, more recently, Christopher Nealon’s The Matter of Capital (2011)). It does so by viewing the Russian Revolution as a foundational event in the narrative of modern American verse. A much needed counter to ideological micro-criticism, Red Modernism unfolds on an ambitiously broad canvas, seeking to highlight the epic global backdrop to the poems containing history that so preoccupied Pound and his compatriots William Carlos William and Louis Zukofsky. In Steven’s uncompromising opening gambit, the Russian events of 1917 were ‘a blinding flash of revolutionary energy [that] lit up against the night sky of modernity’s global territories’ (p. 1). Where previous studies have tended to deconstruct Pound’s radicalism or skirt around it completely, Steven’s introduction is refreshingly bold in describing Pound as a ‘geopolitical lightening rod’ who ‘[received] communist signals and [relayed] them back through the conductive substance of modernism’ (p. 4).
While such lyrical postulates – themselves redolent of scientific metaphors in early Pound and Eliot – lay out Steven’s thesis in the abstract, the remainder of Red Modernism argues meticulously for the centrality of the communist ideal in the work of Pound, Williams and Zukofsky. Of the three, Pound might seem the most unlikely candidate for this sort of revisionist contention. Up to now, critics have tended to stop at accepting that rightist and leftist thinking were often intertwined in the 1910s and 1920s, examining Pound’s engagement with left-leaning periodicals of the period (notably A. R. Orage’s New Age) to uncover the ambiguous roots of his fascist worldview. But Steven mounts a convincing case for Pound as a thoroughgoing ‘bastardized Marxist’ (pp. 42–3) for whom the Bolshevik Revolution was not only a news story woven into the historical tapestry of the Cantos but a pivotal moment and full reification of the Vorticist axioms of 1914.
Pound was mainly attracted to the heroic energy of Bolshevism though, as Steven concedes, it was eventually the decidedly anti-communist hero-cult of Mussolini that would take centre stage in his life and work. Williams, in contrast, felt the influence of communism in more bathetic, democratic ways. The starting point of Steven’s chapter on Williams is the notion that his immediate post-1917 oeuvre carried over from Bolshevism a ‘kind of practical imagination as realized through labor’ (p. 100). Williams’s avowal of American collectivism in portrayals of everyday work and leisure was, in Steven’s view, an indirect response to the advent of Russian communism.
Central to Williams’s aesthetic sensibility, as Red Modernism demonstrates, was a reimagining of American individualism so that it could embody a ‘hypothetical communist subjectivity’ (p. 123). In this vision, which seems to have emerged partly from Williams’s interest in cinema and photography, communism’s ‘forceful renovation of the individual’ (p. 121) was expressed in a profound equation of ‘man’ and ‘city’. Paterson (1946–58) was, of course, the most expansive outcome of this hypothesis and, though its final versions vastly postdate the events of 1917, Steven’s careful analysis of the poem is persuasive in arguing that its ‘riots, mob violence… and revolutionary energy’ (p. 160) were at least in some sense part of an attempt to ‘Americanize Lenin’ (p. 156).
Red Modernism offers some of its most colourfully original thinking when it finally turns to Zukofsky, perhaps because his doctrinaire Marxism provides the most critical lassitude for an argument of this kind. While Zukofsky (born 1904) was the only self-identifying communist of the three subjects here, Steven points out that his second-generation status distanced him from the revolutionary excitement of 1917, leading him to commit to the ‘specifically utopian dimensions of communism’ (p. 165) rather than its diminishing real-world materiality.
As a result, Steven shows, Zukofsky’s verse was, in common with many of his modernist coevals, filled with super-worldly, interstellar imagery. But for Zukofsky, poetic references to stars, the moon, luminosity and the perpetual revolution of constellations amounted to ‘a whole new branch of science fiction’ (p. 187) that hinted at a ‘utopian presentation… beyond the experiential space of capitalism and that mode of production’s illuminating technologies’ (p. 177). Yet more intriguing is Steven’s contention, in part indebted to prior work by Jennison in The Zukofsky Era, that Zukofsky’s communism found expression in depictions of a ‘cybernetic’ Lenin (p. 188), which in turn encouraged him to reflect on the poetic possibilities of ‘equipping… technology with distinctly organic features’ (p. 189).
In making its highly original case for the historical importance of communism in American poetry, Red Modernism goes some way towards redrawing the map of modernist criticism, pointing to ways in which revolutionary praxis can illuminate and inspire our reading of twentieth-century literature. This, it should go without saying, is a substantial achievement, yet it is also a timely one. As global politics become more febrile by the day, the future of literary scholarship is likely to be dominated by research like that which underpins Red Modernism – research brave enough to step out of the cul-de-sac of studying historical marginalia in order to engage with epic works of literature on a correspondingly epic scale.