Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of The American Left. . - Reviews - book review

Radical Teacher, Fall, 2002 by James Smethurst

Cary Nelson (Routledge, 2001)

Cary Nelson's Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (1989) was a landmark study that recontextualized our sense of modernism and modern U.S. poetry. Drawing particularly on largely lost or occluded traditions of Left poetry Nelson called into question how and why modern poetry took the shape that it did (and still largely does) in the academy and opened up a huge vista of possible scholarly projects of recovery and recontextualization. Nelson's Revolutionary Memory is a similarly provocative study that in some senses takes up his own challenge by seeking to reveal, examine, and reappraise a wealth of Left U.S. poetry in a manner that will stimulate much work by other scholars.

Nelson's study begins with an essay that attempts to delineate a sort of family tree of modern Left poetry in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. Nelson expands assumptions of what we might consider "Left," including the work of Chinese immigrants written on the walls of the detention barracks of Angel Island while they awaited the disposition of their cases by U.S. immigration authorities in the early twentieth century. As in Repression and Recovery, he challenges still-widespread notions of what literature is, examining a wide range of texts including labor and immigrant newspapers, political broadsides, and labor songs as well as more "traditional" poetic texts. As part of the process of drawing this genealogy, Nelson also advances some of the reasons how and why this poetry has been obscured with some poets completely erased from the critical record and others variously attached to different ancestries or affiliations (sometimes with help from the poet him- or herself).

The following three chapters consider more narrowly limited historical, authorial, and/or generic moments: the poetry of Edwin Rolfe; the community, the institutions, and the aesthetics of 1930s radical poetry; and the Left poetry of the Spanish Civil War. Of course, these chapters overlap considerably. Edwin Rolfe was a leading poet of the Communist Left during 1930s as well as an Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran. The Spanish Civil War was a central topos of 1930s radical culture. In this way, Nelson is able to take on a number of commonplaces about the Left poetry of the 1930s, demonstrating that all Left or "proletarian" poets and poetry are not interchangeable. He also resists the familiar critical desire to save these poets from themselves by proving that they were not really "Left" (especially if the Left in question is that of the Communist Party) and did not really follow the "line." Instead, Nelson begins to sketch out some common Left poetics and filiations without flattening out the differences betw een artists or the intra-Left cultural debates.

If Nelson's efforts here do not seem as startlingly original as those of Repression and Recovery, it is largely because a significant number of scholars took up the challenge of his earlier book so that Revolutionary Memory has considerable company where Repression and Recovery (along with the earlier work of Alan Wald) stood virtually alone. Nonetheless, the work of few scholars has anything like the sweep and passion of Nelson's study. He ambitiously, and generally successfully, combines by turns biography, close reading, and broader generic considerations. While Revolutionary Memory is written on a level that would be difficult for most high school students, one could imagine it being tremendously useful secondary reading in a variety of college-level courses focusing on modernism and modern U.S. poetry.

One does wish that Nelson had continued his examination beyond the poetic generation that came of age during the Depression. For example, radical artists and intellectuals active in the 1930s and 1940s had a major influence, and in some instances played major roles, in the development of the Black Arts Movement and the New Black Poetry during the 1960s. It would have been good to see a family tree that would include Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Ebon Dooley, Carolyn Rodgers, Sterling Plumpp, and Askia Toure as well as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Sterling Brown. In fact, if Nelson looked at Hughes's relationship with many of the younger militant black poets of the 1960s, as well as Left African American individuals and institutions during the 1950s and 1960s, including Louis Thompson Patterson, William Patterson, John O. Killens, Esther Jackson, the Committee on the Negro in the Arts, and Freedomways, it would have strengthened his extremely interesting discussion of Hughes as well as exe mplified how the literary legacy of the Left has been effaced, misrepresented, or concealed.

Nonetheless, despite these relatively small reservations, Nelson's book is an important realization of the sort of literary archeology that he called for in Repression and Recovery. It is particularly valuable in its sustained attention to the poetics, practice, context, influence, and achievement of the Depression generation of Left poets, placing (or replacing) those poets within longer and larger Left traditions.