Revolutionary Memory Recovering the Poetry of the American Left

Revolutionary Memory is the most important book yet to be published about the vital tradition of leftwing American Poetry. As Cary Nelson shows, it is not only our image of the past but also our sense of the present and future that changes when we recover these revolutionary memories. Making a forceful case for political poetry as poetry, Nelson brings to bear his extraordinary knowledge of American poets, radical movements, and social struggles in order to bring out an undervalued strength in a literature often left at the canon's edge. Focused in part of the red decade of the 1930s, Revolutionary Memory revitalizes biographical criticism for writers on the margin and shows us for the first time how progressive poets fused their work into a powerful chorus of political voices. Richly detailed and beautifully illustrated with period engravings and woodcuts, Revolutionary Memory brings that chorus dramatically to life and set a cultural agenda for future work.

Introduction One: Modern Poems We Have Wanted to Forget 1. A poetry Dossier 2. Establishment Memory and Political poetry 3. The Assault on Langston Hughes 4. Naming Names Two: From the Great Depression to the Red Scare: The Poetry of Edwin Rolfe 1. Poetry as Lived History 2. The Lessons of Spain 3. Poetry Against McCarthyism Three: Poetry Chorus: The Politics of Revolutionary Memory 1. The Community of the Left 2. Tillie Olsen's Sweat Shop Poem 3. Revolution's Collective Voice Poetry Chorus: How Much for Spain? 1. Don Quixote in Prison 2. When Madrid Was the Tomb of Fascism 3. A Lament for Garcia Lorca 4. Exile without End

Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He is the editor of the Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford). He has co-authored or co-edited several books for Routledge, including Academic Keywords, Madrid 1937, and Cultural Studies.