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The Pound Reaction

Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature

Gross, Andrew S.

European Views of the United States, Bd. 7

2015

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Abstract

Ezra Pound was confined in a mental institution and facing treason charges when he won the first Bollingen Prize in 1949. Pound’s defenders claimed that the Prize proved artistic freedom to be alive and well in the United States. Only totalitarian regimes forced artists to tow the party line. ‘The Pound Reaction’ explores how a number of writers responded to this free speech defense of Pound’s poetry. Those discussed include Bollingen committee member Karl Shapiro, who believed that his vote against Pound ruined his career; W. H. Auden, who voted for Pound but suggested his work should be suppressed; Peter Viereck, the poet and conservative thinker whose father was a convicted Nazi propagandist; John Berryman, who struggled with the legacy of Pound’s anti-Semitism throughout his career; and Katherine Anne Porter, who voted to honor Pound’s poetry but thought the poet should stand trial (he never did). Other writers discussed include Lowell, Bishop, Plath, Ginsberg, and Leslie Fiedler.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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Cover C
Title Page iii
Copyright iv
Table of Contents vii
Preface ix
List of Publications under the Auspices of the European Association for American Studies xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
Chapter I, Lyrical Freedom and Institutional Confinement: Following in Pound’s Footsteps 43
Chapter II, Liberalism and Lyricism, or Karl Shapiro’s Elegy for Identity 67
Trial of a Poet 69
Individualism and Identity 73
Identity as Confession 79
Shapiro’s Elegy for Identity 83
Chapter III, Individualism, Auden’s Anxiety, and the Liberal Unconscious 95
An Age Takes a Name 96
Auden’s Anxiety 104
Pound beyond the Pale 120
Chapter IV, “When conservatism was still a dirty word …”: Modernism, New Conservatism, and Peter Viereck’s “Poetry of Ideas” 127
The Pound Reaction and the Liberal Aesthetic 136
Conservatism and Literature: Viereck contra Pound 139
Remembering Viereck: “When conservatism was still a dirty word 154
Forget Viereck 163
Chapter V, “Pull Down Vanity”: Porter, Fiedler, and the Pornographic Imagination (A Prosaic Interlude) 165
Porter: The Passionate Limits of Individualism 173
Love and Death at Midcentury 189
Chapter VI, Imaginary Jews and True Confessions: Ethnicity, Lyricism, and John Berryman’s. The Dream Songs 201
“The Imaginary Jew” and the Mirror of Anti-Semitism 205
Genocide, Poetry, and the Doctrine of Impersonality 209
The Dream Songs, Impersonation, and Palatable Monstrosity 214
Imaginary Jews, True Confessions, and Ethnicity 219
Epilogue 227
Bibliography 233
Index 251