Cary Nelson's Socioeconomic View

Cary Nelson seeks to historicize the study of modern American poetry in order to correct the record of literary history as it has been institutionalized in the academy. Nelson argues that poetry is more varied and complicated than the narratives that are told about it, narratives that reduce complexity by deemphasizing or completely skipping over whole poetic traditions. In particular, Nelson points out that much poetry was being written that rejected the modernist break from the past. The poetry that survives the critical and historical apparatus is a modernism that "reinforces a romantic ideology of timeless individual achievement and a disdain for lived experience" (37).

I find it very easy to agree with all of this. A problem emerges, however, when Nelson attempts to discuss what makes overlooked poetry worth recovering. For example, he praises H. H. Lewis's "Thinking of Russia":

I'm always thinking of Russia,
I can't keep her out of my head,
I don't give a damn for Uncle Sham,
I'm a left-wing radical Red.

Nelson highlights the concise and effective wordplay that substitutes Sham for Sam, but this is the whole poem. I may be looking for techniques that I've been trained to by the academy, but if there's no other skillful use of language than a quick pun, than I'm not sure what there is to value. Nelson appreciates its commitment and clarity, but the poem seems flat to me as a use of language.

My comments here of course reveal the unfortunate tendencies against which Nelson struggles. Our aesthetic perspectives are based on entirely different notions of what the function of poetry is. Without inventive language and an important discovery that rewards repeated readings, I'm just not that interested. To me, it reads like propaganda -- and it would if it was for rather than against the American economic (and military) system. In fact, I'm sympathetic to the underlying concerns that give rise to the third line, but the poem itself hasn't investigated these in a compelling way. Staunch (though humorous) assertion is all we get.

Nelson succeeds more when he discusses poets or poems that are richly provocative that have only sometimes been coopted by the prevailing literary history. Nelson admits that poetry can be interpreted -- and especially retroactively interpreted -- to perform different social functions. He discusses Eliot's The Waste Land as a poem with at least two viable histories, the revolutionary and the reactionary. Nelson contends that it cannot be decided which of these two is true; the practice of literary history involves understanding the direction and uses of interpretation.