Hog butchers, beggars, and busboys : poverty, labor, and the making of modern American poetry / John Marsh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Marsh, John, 1975-

Series:

Class, culture

Class : culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

American poetry.

Working class in literature.

Labor in literature.

Modernism (Literature)--United States.

Modernism (Literature).

United States.

Physical Description:

269 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2011]

Summary:

Between 1909 and 1922, the genre of poetry was remade. Literary scholars have long debated why modern American poetry emerged when it did and in the form it did. In the past poetry had rhymed, scanned, and dealt with fairly conventional subjects like love and nature, but modern poets wrote poetry that looked and sounded very different from its predecessors, and that dealt with whole new areas of experience. Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys argues that one of the ways modern poets could "make it new," as Ezra Pound commanded, was by writing into their verse what other poetry had suppressed: the gritty realities of modern life, including the problems of the poor and working class.

A closer look at the early works of the twentieth century's best known poets (William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Carl Sandburg) reveals the long-neglected role that the labor problem-including woman and child labor, immigration, sweatshops, poverty, unemployment, alienation, and strikes-played in the formation of canonical modern American poetry. Unlike reformers and progressives, for whom the solution to the labor problem involved a redistribution of resources and power, modern poets remained ambivalent toward such solutions. Rather, they invoked workers and the poor to register their own discontent with modern life and modern capitalism, so they could rehearse "solutions" to the labor problem that would have seemed-and did seem-nostalgic and irrelevant even to their contemporaries. Both a revisionary history of literary modernism and an exploration into how poets uniquely made the labor problem their own, this book will appeal to modernists in the field of American and British literature, in addition to a wider academic audience of scholars working in the field of American studies and the growing field of working-class literature. Book jacket.

Contents:

To make poetry out of the unpoetical: Modern American poetry and the labor problem

"Thinking / Of the Freezing Poor": The Suburban Counterpastoral in William Carlos Williams's early poetry

Aware and awareless: T. S. Eliot's labor problems

"Starve, freeze": Edna St. Vincent Millay, conspicuous privation, and the political economy -of Bohemia

"Yes, sir!": Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and the poetics of serving

A lost art of work: the fate of the craft ideal in Carl Sandburg's Chicago poems

Conclusion: Distinctions with and without a difference.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780472071579

0472071572

9780472051571

0472051571

OCLC:

687681400