Modernism/modernity

Continual revolution of the blood.Continual cataclysm of the brain catharsis of        thoughtsthings deeds … … We need to bethe continual animation of a dreamto bend the steel or be bent by it.A man should live these things as he lies in gravesneither up nor down but sideways with his head        and feetpointing to human and more human polesand the hand touches another and we meet.

—Walter Lowenfels, "Steel" (1937)¹

Remember now there were others before this;Now when the unwanted hours rise up,And the sun rises red in unknown quarters,And the constellations change places,And cloudless thunder erases the furrows,And moonlight stains and the stars grow hot

—Kenneth Rexroth, "From the Paris Commune to the Kronstadt Rebellion" (1940)²

Kenneth Rexroth's 1940 poem "From the Paris Commune to the Kronstadt Rebellion" does not immediately or explicitly announce itself as an elegy. It does, however, position itself quite conspicuously within a history of politically engaged poetry on the left. The title establishes the poem's historical parameters, a fifty-year timeline of revolutionary struggle, and the repeated [End Page 87] injunctions to "rise up" invite us to read it as more deeply invested in militant solidarity than in meditative solace. Despite the poem's obvious reliance on the rhetoric and rhythms of violent insurrection, it is also invested, more subtly, in scenes of elegiac resurrection. Its speaker imagines him/herself as at once a manifestation of past models (the Paris communards; the Kronstadt sailors) and a prefiguration of "people remembering in the future" (Rexroth, Complete Poems, 144). This suspension between a backward-looking directive to "remember" and a speculative invocation of a future time when the speaker's radical ideals have been realized invites us to consider the ways in which elegiac expression might be a spur to, rather than an idle distraction from, revolutionary action. My categorization of the poem as an elegy also has broader implications, as I hope to show, for thinking about genre and tone in mid-century American poetry.

In what follows, I offer an account of the rise of the elegy and the anarcho-pacifist essay during what I am calling the long 1940s.³ I compare a largely under-studied archive of small-circulation, trans-Atlantic anarchist periodicals to the body of poetry written in their orbit, and argue that the dissident politics of private refusal and small-scale sociability being theorized within these print networks—and in particular, in essays by Dwight Macdonald, Paul Goodman, and Andrea Caffi—are marked by an elegiac sensibility. In the final section of my article, I turn to a selection of political elegies by Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Patchen, and Jackson Mac Low. In these poems, encounters between ephemerality (in the form of fragile bodies and social configurations) and durability (in the form of inert matter and centuries-old poetic traditions) serve as occasions for reflection on the perceived narrowing of viable political outlets for writers and thinkers on the left and on the hopes engendered by uprisings past. They reimagine and expand the English elegy's expression of private grief, allowing elegies to act as barometers of large-scale historical trends (the rise of totalitarianism; the lost leftism of American liberalism) and their attendant structures of feeling. In a recent monograph, Mark Greif coins the term "crisis of man discourse" to refer to the tendency among mid-century intellectuals to probe and pressure test the category of "the human"—thought, at an historical juncture marked by ideological disappointments, global war, and rapid technological advances, to be under assault in unprecedented ways (Age of the Crisis of Man, 18). Where Greif demonstrates how narrative and philosophical genres get scaled up to accommodate accounts of humanity in crisis (the weighty philosophical tome and the "great American novel" are his touchstones), I hope to give a sense of the unique capacity of this era's poetry to "think big" even as it locates the kernel of radical social transformation in the communal and aesthetic practices of small, marginalized groups.

My attention...