Making Something Happen

288 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 6 illus., notes, bibl., index

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-4979-8
Published: November 2001
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-7500-1
Published: January 2003
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-7347-7
Published: January 2003

Cultural Studies of the United States

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"Poetry makes nothing happen," wrote W. H. Auden in 1939, expressing a belief that came to dominate American literary institutions in the late 1940s--the idea that good poetry cannot, and should not, be politically engaged. By contrast, Michael Thurston here looks back to the 1920s and 1930s to a generation of poets who wrote with the precise hope and the deep conviction that they would move their audiences to action. He offers an engaging new look at the political poetry of Edwin Rolfe, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, and Muriel Rukeyser.

Thurston combines close textual reading of the poems with research into their historical context to reveal how these four poets deployed the resources of tradition and experimentation to contest and redefine political common sense. In the process, he demonstrates that the aesthetic censure under which much partisan writing has labored needs dramatic revision. Although each of these poets worked with different forms and toward different ends, Thurston shows that their strategies succeed as poetry. He argues that partisan poetry demands reflection not only on how we evaluate poems but also on what we value in poems and, therefore, which poems we elevate.

About the Author

Michael Thurston is assistant professor of English at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
For more information about Michael Thurston, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"The readings of interwar American activist poetry offered here are detailed and interesting, combining research into the poets' other political activities."--Virginia Quarterly Review

"Highly informative."--Choice

"By offering a truly culturally informed close reading of American political poetry, Thurston's book makes many important things happen: he opens up what we mean by 'political poetry,' he reshapes literary categories such as 'modernism,' and he offers a wonderfully readable example of the best sort of mix of literary history, literary criticism, and cultural studies. His clarity and engagement challenge contemporary criticism."--Carla Kaplan, University of Southern California

"Making Something Happen breaks with earlier studies that have tended to segregate poets on the left from those on the extreme right. Examining the formal conventions of traditional English lyricism and experimental modernism, Michael Thurston makes a strong case for poetry's social agency across the divide of modernist political culture."--Walter Kalaidjian, Emory University