Poetry And The Political Right
Poetry And The Political Right

Summary/Abstract: The present paper treats the concept of modernism in poetry from the perspective of associating certain aesthetic activities with forms of power through the simple but by no means superficial connection of art to the political and the social, in spite of the fact that one of the indisputable characteristics of Modernism was that of transcending the social and, respectively, the political. Modernism coincided with or perhaps contributed to the unfolding of a political “map” of the 20th century which, in a simple and superficial list, would enumerate: „the Red Intelligentsia”, “the Ku Klux Klan”, fascism and Nazism with their militants, “free speech”, verse libre, “free love” etc. The paper proposes to examine a few modern American poems from the beginning of the 20th century which engaged themselves in the field of the political and the social by their involvement exerted in the name of Art, Culture and Literature. The paper tries to re-consider the modernist text viewing it less as a hermetic construct that would have nothing in common with the experiences of its contemporary social but as a text involved in and reflecting the social and the political, the text being thus “politically read” The alliances of Modernism with the political Right would induce the idea that they have a common ideological discourse which, if applied to poetry, would blend notions like poetic form and value, the tradition of writing with ideologies of culture, nation, modernization and race.

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