Ideological Content and Political Significance of Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Freely drawing on philosophy, sociology, literary criticism, and cultural studies to analyze poetics and rhetorical strategies and show the aesthetic responses of poets to a chaotic and confusing age, this book discusses the vital political movements of totalitarianism and utopian thought, in the context of modern poetry. It examines how the poetry of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson and the Language Poets both masks and transforms political thought. In its examination of political consciousness, this study will aid readers in deciphering meaning in texts that have often struck critics as arbitrary, nonsensical, frustrating, and impenetrable.