Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War

by Mark W. van Wienen

• ISBN13: 9780521563963
• ISBN10: 0521563968
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-02-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Partisans and Poets explores the popular poetries which interacted with American political culture during World War I. Studying the interplay between poets, political groups and social transformation, the book draws upon archival materials to explore poetry used by the Woman's Peace Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, the NAACP, and The Vigilantes, a patriotic writers' syndicate. Van Wienen describes how poetry in mainstream newspapers and major-press anthologies bolstered dominant, nationalist ideologies, and demonstrates how pacifist and socialist verse mobilised minority groups contending for hegemonic power. While recovering the work of several forgotten modern poets - women, blacks, pacifists, patriots, and radicals - the book asserts that wartime poetry engaged in complex negotiations with specific and often dangerous political and historical circumstances.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Partisan poetics, circa 1914

1. I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier: The Woman's Peace Party and the Pacifist Majority

2. The new society within the shell of the old: Wobbly Parody Poetical and Political

3. The barbarians at the gate: The Soldier-Poet and the Great War in Black and White

4. Marketing patriotism: The Frugal Housewife and the Consumption of Poetry

5. Beating the competition: The Woman's Peace Party and the Industrial Workers of the World on Trial

6. While this war lasts: Readerly Resistance on the Color Line and the Bread Line

Conclusion: history and poetry in the age of irony.