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9781469694009 Academic Inspection Copy

Poetry Makes You Happen

American Poetry from Modernism to the Social Movement
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Modernist poetry has long had a reputation for craft formalism and political conservatism that overshadows its radical legacies. Lukas Moe shows how midcentury US poets and poetics drew upon leftwing culture to pave the way for diversity and pluralism in contemporary poetry. Poets used modernist forms to write poems of individual dissent and systemic critique that resonated with the ambitious visions of social movements in postwar US society. Audre Lorde's sense that poetry "makes you happen"-a remix of W. H. Auden's old saw that "poetry makes nothing happen"-exemplifies the power of what Moe calls verse culture: the archives, networks, and print media that sustain individual poetic creation and collective imagination. By resituating authors such as Sterling A. Brown, Robert Hayden, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, and Muriel Rukeyser into a fluid political network of commitment and dissent, Moe narrates a compelling literary political history that deepens our understanding of what poetry can do in difficult times.
Lukas Moe is an independent scholar of twentieth-century poetry and poetics, modernism and radicalism, and social movement literature.
"Lukas Moe weaves underread, out of print, and unpublished works into an intellectual and literary history where the aesthetic and artistic precepts of modernism are shown to generate legacies of leftist, ethnically diverse politics and culture in following generations."-Kamran Javadizadeh, Villanova University
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