Description
Book SynopsisA retelling of American modernism through the lines of solidarity and division within and among ethnic and religious identities found in poetry. What happens if we approach the reading and writing of poetry not as an individual act, but as a public one? Answering this question challenges common assumptions about modern poetry and requires that we explore the important questions that define genre: Where is this poem situated, and how did it get there?Joshua Logan Wall's Situating Poetry studies five poets of the New York literary scene rarely considered together: James Weldon Johnson, Charles Reznikoff, Lola Ridge, Louis Zukofsky, and Robert Hayden. Charting their works and careers from 19101940, Wall illustrates how these politically marginalized writers from drastically different religious backgrounds wrestled with their status as American outsiders. These poets produced a secularized version of America in which poetry, rather than God, governed individual obligations to one another
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Covenantal Spaces
Chapter 1. A Congregation of Readers: James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones
Chapter 2. Renewing the Covenant: Charles Reznikoff's Recitative
Part II: Circulating Modernism
Chapter 3. Immigrant Publics: Lola Ridge On and Off the Page
Chapter 4. Louis Zukofsky and the Poetics of Exodus
Part III: Limit Cases
Chapter 5. A Covenantal Limit Case: Robert Hayden Beyond the Lyric
Coda: The House We Build Together
Notes
Index
