Cold War Poetry - Hardcover

Brunner, Edward J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 025202592X ISBN 13: 9780252025921

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2000

Synopsis

Mainstream American poetry of the 1950s has long been dismissed as deliberately indifferent to its cultural circumstances. In this penetrating study, Edward Brunner breaks the placid surface of the hollow decade to reveal a poetry sharply responsive to issues of its time.Cold War Poetry considers the fifties poem as part of a cultural project to initiate an upwardly mobile postwar audience into high culture. Brunner revisits Richard Wilbur, Randall Jarrell, and other acknowledged leaders of the period as well as neglected writers such as Rosalie Moore, V. R. Lang, Katherine Hoskins, Melvin B. Tolson, and Hyam Plutzik. He examines the one-sided authority of the (male-dominated) book review process and the power of the classroom anthology to establish criteria for reading. He also recontextualizes the decade's much-maligned domestic verse and examines how poetry written about the Bomb uses coded language to register a growing sense of cosmic disorder.Attributing the gradual change in poetic style during the 1950s to the slow collapse of the authority of the state, Brunner shows how a secretive, anxious poetics developed in the shadow of a disabled government. Brilliantly decoding the politics embedded in the poetry of an ostensibly apolitical time, Edward Brunner's Cold War Poetry provides a powerful rereading of a pivotal decade.About the Edward Brunner, a professor of English at Southern Illinois University, is the author of Splendid Hart Crane and the Making of "The Bridge" and Poetry as Labor and The Writings of W. S. Merwin .

About this title

About the Author

Edward Brunner is professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

Review

"Erudite and comprehensive... Commendable for its revisionist perspective and its wealth of scholarly information. " -- Choice "There are many close, instructive readings of poems (and careers). Altogether, a remarkable integration of social contexts and poetic details." -- Virginia Quarterly Review ADVANCE PRAISE "Cold War Poetry changes our understanding not just of the fifties but of how that decade leaves its mark, however effaced, on everything after in contemporary poetics." -- Walter Kalaidjian, author of American Culture between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique "This is quite simply the best book ever written on American poetry of the 1950s. Brunner's claim that 1950s mythological and domestic poetry displays displaced political anxiety is both new and persuasive. His treatment of minority and women's writing gives us our first full account of the period." -- Cary Nelson, editor of Oxford's Anthology of Modern American Poetry

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 025202592X
• ISBN 13: 9780252025921
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 300