Red or Dead: States of Poetry in Depression America.

“Red or Dead: States of Poetry in Depression America” is at once an in-depth study of interwar poetic culture and a cultural history of the idea of poetry. This dissertation approaches the “red decade” of the 1930s as a formative period for modern American poetics. Surveying a wide range of poems, essays, and periodicals as well as previously unpublished manuscripts, correspondence, and photo-texts, I examine how shifts in discourses about poetry relate to the consolidation of the U.S. Left in response to economic depression and fascism. More specifically, I document the pervasive belief in the ’30s that poetry was “dead,” and I reveal how Left cultural workers, especially, imagined new possibilities for the art via its presumed death. Utilizing a range of genres and forms and casting off traditional lyric practice, Left poets declared not just the death of poetry but the death of bourgeois individualism—on their way to conceiving a utopian revolutionary community outside of the spatial and temporal parameters of the nation-state. Examining the response to Poetry editor Harriet Monroe’s death in 1936, Chapter 1 challenges predominant conceptions of literary modernism. Chapter 2 focuses on debates about poetry’s life and death in Left periodicals, showing how poetic rhythm was idealized as a medium for representing workers’ speech. Chapter 3 studies Langston Hughes’s overlooked archive of scrapbooks from his 1931 trip to Haiti, arguing that the growing cultural relevance of documentary photography reshaped discourses about poetry’s cultural function and utopian potentials. Chapter 4 uses Jacques Roumain’s writings about poetry’s death to open these discussions to broader hemispheric shifts, showing how literary networks connecting the African-American and Haitian Left constitute an important inter-space for the development of black radical poetry. While this dissertation participates in recent efforts to restore to critical view Left poetry, it also puts the study of radical poetry on new conceptual ground. Using the methods of historical poetics and original archival research, I offer a nuanced, comprehensive, and, perhaps, unprecedented account of Depression-era poetic culture. In so doing, I expand methodological possibilities for historical poetics, addressing how poetic and historical practices are mutually constitutive.PhDEnglish Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95988/1/seehlers_1.pd