Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960 Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Counter-revolution of the Word explores in great depth the antimodernist literary movement of the mid 20th century. Alan Filreis, author of Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, & Literary Radicalism, here investigates the question: Why did American conservatives react so strongly against modernism?
In preparing for this book Filreis dug deeply into archives across the country, sifting through original documents and correspondence, to examine how the anticommunist witch hunt of the mid 20th century combined with, and helped fuel, antimodernist attacks on new poetry and experimental writing.
To conservatives, the language of modernism was a 'linguistically heretical' mode that sought to 'destroy the designed order.' Conservative poet Robert Hillyer and others considered linguistic 'difficulty' part of a grand design to reduce Americans to a state of helpless confusion.
All this seems surreal, almost unbelievable. Yet look around and see how some people even today brand others as 'unAmerican' simply because they prefer to think for themselves and draw their conclusions independently of what the power structure would have them believe.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960

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.

Click here for more information about Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960