Poetry Politics and Culture

<p>A salient feature of modern poetics is its direct connection with cultural history and politics. Among the great American poets of the twentieth century Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams offer a significant contrast with T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Where the latter advocated a theocentric or reactionary response to the cultural crises of modernity the former affirmed an essentially humanist and democratic social and aesthetic ethos. In <em>Poetry Politics and Culture</em> Harold Kaplan offers a penetrating comparative study of these representative and distinctively influential poets.</p><p>All four poets wrote in an atmosphere of cultural crisis following World War I caught as they were between outmoded belief systems and various forms of artistic and political nihilism. While each believed in poetry as a source of cultural values and beliefs they nevertheless experienced loss of confidence in their own vocation in a world characterized by scientific rationalist thinking and the mundane struggle for survival. For each therefore the poetic imagination was a means of restoring order or building a new civilization out of chaos. In trying to define a revitalized culture the four exemplified the perennial quarrel between Europe and America.</p>