Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism by Mark Steven, and: Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley (review)

Making sense of William Carlos Williams’s political commitments continues to be of interest in all its rather complicated forms and iterations. One recent, ambitious approach is that of Mark Steven in Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism, a book apparently timed to appear in October 2017 on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Appear it did, staking a claim on links connecting Williams, Pound, and Zukofsky not just as modernist poetic innovators and experimenters, and thus literary revolutionists of sorts, but as poets deeply implicated in the politics of communist revolution in the twentieth century. Less specifically devoted to Williams, and somewhat in contrast to Steven’s enlistment of Williams as a revolutionist through the implications of style and genre, Poet Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley, portrays the attenuation of the radical impulses of modernism as the twentieth century wore on and Cold War liberalism as a strategic safe zone for careerists in poetry. BOOK REVIEW