CHRONICLERS AND CRITICS OF THE 1930s have argued among themselves
               so unremittingly about the cultural role of radicalism that the newest and most
               flexible among them are often hindered rather than liberated by the
               debate.[1] The bitterness of this fighting has made me somewhat reluctant to present
               Modernism from Right to Left as a call for similar contentiousness to commence
               among admirers of modern American poetry. It strikes me nonetheless that the almost
               total absence of such dispute in discussions of this poetry is one of the reasons why an
               auspicious direction in the study of modernism's relation to the "clever hopes" of that
               allegedly "low, dishonest decade."[2] remains largely untried. Another reason, not
               easily documented, is that those rhetorically trained by American doctoral programs in
               literature during the past forty years to read poets like Wallace Stevens and Marianne
               Moore, and to a somewhat lesser extent William Carlos Williams, have not also been
               attracted to writing that once called itself "revolutionary" in the political sense. After the
               thirties--one decade when literary radicals were reading these modernists, as I will
               show--the exceptions have been only very recent.[3] As a corollary to this unwritten
               professional rule, it might be further supposed that insofar as critics of depression-era
               writing have, in Cary Ne lson's words, "treat[ed] the political poetry of the period as a
               unitary phenomenon and reject[ed] it contemptuously[4] (for "unitary" frowningly read
               "ideological" or even "Stalinist"), critics of Stevens's depression-era writing have
               congenially embraced his modernism, judging it elastic and accommodating (for these
               terms happily read "non- ideological" and "anti-Stalinist"). Obviously, the two groups
               haven't been talking to each other. Why not? Lively and productive, if often bitter,
               interaction between noncommunists and communists was a fortunate topic of study as
               soon as, in the 1960s, historians got out from under the proto-Cold War spell of
               Eugene Lyons's The Red Decade of 1941. Frank Warren's Liberals and Communism
               (1966) made its rejoinder to Lyons's thesis of "Stalinist penetration of America" not by
               claiming to the contrary that communism was "at most a very minor influence" on
               noncommunist thinking in the thirties, but by carefully describing points of intersection
               and crossing.[5] In one sense, then, my book presents a similar dialogue between those
               two positions on the matter of poetry, not for the purpose of finding some safe centrism
               (perhaps Warren's one flaw) but rather to point up a false distinction that separated
               modernism and radicalism in the first place.

               But even such recent revisions of the modernism-radicalism debate as Wald, Nelson,
               Harvey Teres,[12] Charlotte Nekola,[13] James D. Bloom,[14] Judy Kutulas,[15] and
               others[16] have recently managed has for professional and methodological reasons not
               been very easily achieved. Finding "the density, the generic ambiguity, and the
               understanding of . . . their own status as mediated and mediating"--in other words,
               qualities ascribed to modernist writing--in the work of Mike Gold and Joseph
               Freeman, Bloom has traced the "work[s] of recovery" that made his own possible. For
               every effort to clear the way made by the likes of Daniel Aaron (Writers on the Left)
               and Marcus Klein (Foreigners) during the busy twenty-year period bordered by these
               two books (1961-1981), "chronic obstacles" have been set up by the thirties' many
               retrospective antagonists. Scholars who get past the interpretations of ex- and
               anti-communists must still then confront those of "the 'Eliotic-Trotskyist' Partisan
               Review strain" that would reject out of hand Bloom's audacious notion that Gold and
               Freeman can be read for modernist features.[17] It is because interpretive infighting of
               this sort has continued among cultural historians of thirties radicalism that such
               documentary scholars as those named above have been forced not merely to be
               extra-rigorous, sure- and even slow-footed, and at times very plainly descriptive in
               reorienting the literary history of the period; indeed, they have had to be "decidedly
               old-fashioned" (as Houston Baker suggested provocatively on the dust-jacket of
               Nelson's book) even while demonstrating faithfulness to the postmodern sense that "we
               resemanticize what we do recover."[18] Trying to put modernism and radicalism
               together again, these revisionists have been compelled to cast about for unusual (some
               would say digressive) historical approaches and literally to search for new resources
               that will enable such self- reflectively reconstructive acts to take place without merely
               contributing to a half-century-old argument another, however subtler and more
               luxuriously theorized position, predetermined by either the same old outright dismissals
               or outright acceptances of communism as a home-grown cultural force.

               Wallace Stevens serves extraordinarily well, I contend, in the effort to work through
               and beyond that old familiar pattern. The choice of Stevens to play such a role, I
               realize, will strike some as incendiary if not just strange. He will be known to many
               readers as the author of the ubiquitously anthologized "Sunday Morning" (1915) and
               perhaps, too, for a series of quintessentially modernist poems-about- poetry in which a
               spectral second- or third-person pronoun behaves like a depersonalized, meditative I,
               quietly confessing to an eerily unimportant American life:

                    There is a storm much like the crying of the wind,
                    Words that come out of us like words within,
                    That have rankled for many lives and made no sound. (CP 336)

               Readers ask: "Words that come out of us," really, or out of the speaker? And what
               rankling? And why--and how--so silent? Then, too,

                    there is a man in black space
                    Sits in nothing that we know,
                    Brooding sounds of river noises. . . . (CP 444)

               Reading such lines, one cannot keep from asking, Is it "we"--really all of us--who
               "know" this "nothing"? The metrical force and rhetorical straightforwardness of "there is
               a man" is qualified by this seemingly unearned "we," which seems to draw an equation
               between, on one hand, some estimable singularity sitting remotely nowhere and, on the
               other, a powerful collectivity brooding on nothing. In Wallace Stevens and the Actual
               World (1991), largely a work of literary biography, I characterized Stevens as not so
               much typically remote as in fact involved, even at times preoccupied, with the world of
               political events and trends; I described, in short, the extent to which Stevens was
               capable of meaning more than "oneself" in his lofty-seeming "we." If my choice of the
               last period of Stevens's life and work, 1939 to 1955, from the beginning of World War
               II to the middle of the Cold War, was propitious, it was because my purpose could be
               served by showing Stevens's poetry engaging the issues of an era in which the dominant
               political culture increasingly featured and officially favored ideological disengagement
               (the postwar "end of ideology"). The story of American modernism's 1950s--really, its
               coming of political middle age long after it had come of aesthetic middle age--is also
               the story of the making of the just-mentioned false distinction, invalidating ways in
               which radicalism and modernism had interacted in the 1930s in a 1950s-style narrative
               of the then- outmoded war waged between irreconcilable sides. (And, of course, once
               the sides were aligned in this way, the winner--nonpolitical modernism--could be
               declared.) There are many reasons why the thirties present a problem very different
               from the fifties, but one of them is precisely that what happened to emiment modernists
               in the earlier period happened before the fifties' invention of the myth of wholly
               separate radical and modernist spheres. I have already described how in his last years
               Stevens sensed the revision underway, and how, although his own sense of the thirties
               could not entirely resist being shaped by the fifties' version, the period was obviously
               alluring for him.[19] The reaction in the sixties against this fifties version of the thirties,
               made it hard to trust deconstructions of the myth of separate spheres, such as Stephen
               Spender's obviously sincere claim that "my own Thirties' generation . . . never became
               so politicized as to disagree seriously with an older generation of writers who held
               views often described as 'reactionary.'"[20]

               Any effort to get back to the thirties must spend a good deal of its resources describing
               the getting back. Participants have tended to return to the period again and again to
               present their own (revised) views. Their conflicting recollections make the archive fuller
               but discernment no easier. The old radical lumberman poet, Joe Kalar, predicted in
               1970 that "[t]here will never be an end to books about the thirties," and I think he might
               be right.[21] Similarly, because the myth of separate modernist and communist spheres
               seems so important to its creators and adherents, there may be no end of speculation
               as to why "the modernist" Wallace Stevens reacted with such "strange
               disproportion"[22] to "the communist" Stanley Burnshaw's October 1, 1935, review of
               Stevens's Ideas of Order in the communist New Masses. Critical debate about the
               thirties seemed perpetual to Joe Kalar, by 1970 a veteran of many literary wars,
               because so many of the rhetorical provocations and counterattacks of the period--even
               the strong and not always fruitless rhetorical tradition of fierce self- criticism--were
               carrying over into cultural histories dealing with the period.[23] Little or none of this
               truculence has gotten into Stevens criticism, quite in spite of the fact that a great many
               full-length studies of Stevens's career, and a number of essays, raise the specter of
               Burnshaw.[24] Never, for instance, has anyone posed systematically the question of
               whether Owl's Clover, the poem written largely in response to Burnshaw, discloses
               anything specific about Stevens's understanding of the issues that gave rhetorical force
               to the left. Nor, until very recently, have Stevens critics felt prepared to begin with
               anything but the tired, Cold War-era assumption of "Burnshaw's misdirected
               Marxism."[25] Nor has it been asked whether the young Burnshaw, with his own
               special concerns about a moment Stevens's admirers readily assume was wholly his
               moment, was indeed representative of the cultural communism whose journal he used
               to evaluate Ideas of Order. In many ways, he was not.[26]

               In preparing to write this book, I read extensively in the private papers of communist
               and noncommunist poets who followed Stevens's efforts poem by poem in the thirties.
               This study disclosed, among other things, that the question of Burnshaw's
               representativeness--his having earned the privilege, as it were, to be the one to confront
               Stevens most forthrightly from the left--was an issue raised at the time. Willard Maas
               on the communist left and Samuel French Morse on the center-right were among those
               poets who raised such a doubt. Maas once considered writing about Stevens but soon
               moved away from modern poetry--toward postmodern film and mixed media--and
               never did publish on Stevens. Yet that Maas, then a communist, could privately assert,
               "[i]f I wrote one poem, just one, as good as any in Harmonium [1923] or Ideas of
               Order [1935], I would be willing to stop writing forever,"[27] speaks to the complexity
               of the situation. And Morse, who in the early fifties befriended Stevens and hatched
               plans to be his official biographer, told me that he had lost interest in the Burnshaw
               episode when poets' politics came to seem a less pressing issue than earlier.[28]
               Perhaps it is only just now possible--with archives, such as Maas's and Burnshaw's,
               swelling with incoming letters left and right, papers and materials both literary and
               "ephemeral"--to examine, in ample literary-political context, the noncommunist poet's
               declarations of interest in communism or the contemporaneous claim for Owl's Clover
               that it was intended as a "justification of leftism" (L 295), and to speculate in studies of
               this kind on the degree to which such claims are unreliable.

               If we dismiss a nonradical poet's assertion of leftward movement as thoroughly
               unreliable, should we not then be prepared to explain why a poet as shrewd as Stevens
               could thus have had such a poor sense of how his poetry situated itself politically? In
               exposing a poet like Stevens to such a context, I realize that I risk (quite unintentionally)
               sustaining Irving Howe's chilly 1947 view that Owl's Clover was "rhetoric overrunning
               thought, a[n] assault upon a subject Stevens was not prepared to confront."[29] My
               ambition, on the contrary, is to suggest how similar is the risk of reducing Burnshaw to
               "myopic" and his approach to Stevens as "the coarsest kind of Marxian criticism."[30]
               Anyone who has read "Notes on Revolutionary Poetry," with its affirmative reference
               to I. A. Richards, its scolding of reductive communist assumptions about poetic form,
               its quotation of "revolutionary poems which are plainly precious," would not speak of
               Burnshaw's unreflective orthodoxy.[31] So, too, those who know of Mary McCarthy's
               brief grudging praise in 1936 for Burnshaw's grievance against the American Marxist
               obsession with content--"We have been so much concerned with what the author is
               saying," Burnshaw had written, "that we have neglected the concomitant question: how
               does he say it?"--would not assume radicals' dissociation from modernism.[32]

               Taking both Stevens and Burnshaw a good deal more seriously, my portrait of the
               Burnshaw-Stevens episode in Chapters 5 and 6 is meant to be a portrait of American
               poetry at a crossroads. This stimulating brush with literary radicalism suggests that more
               eminent modernists than one might have guessed understood how their poems were
               going to be read by would-be detractors, and that they understood and even adopted a
               number of basic contemporaneous contentions about poets' standing in American
               society. In describing this "extraordinary" contact, to use Stevens word for it (L 296), I
               aim moreover to locate poetic work generally representative of the noncommunist
               modernist. And I trust that the effort to see thirties poetics through the odd lens of
               Stevens provides a number of new suggestions about American cultural radicalism
               itself. One is that the thirties were not a period in which literary value went out of
               fashion, but rather, to quote Burke looking back from 1952, "a period of stress that
               forced upon all of us"--he meant the so-called "aesthetes" and communists both--"the
               need to decide exactly wherein the worth and efficacy of a literary work reside."[33]

               Such application of Stevens will seem an annoyance to those who prefer to take their
               modernism "as if it were written from nowhere" (which is how Marjorie Perloff
               characterized the common view when commending Peter Brazeau for taking the trouble
               to interview Stevens's business colleagues). Consider that Stevens, not William Carlos
               Williams or Kenneth Fearing or George Oppen or Charles Reznikoff, offered the
               following as a description of a poem he was writing:

                    What I have been trying to do in the thing is to apply my own sort of
                    poetry to such a project.+ Is poetry that is to have a contemporary
                    significance merely to be a collection of contemporary images, or is it
                    actually to deal with the commonplace of the day? I think the latter, but
                    the result seems rather boring.
                    + To What one reads in the papers. (L 308)

               What specifically led me to write a book that describes the convergence of poetic
               -isms is the postscript here: at the last moment, this American poet remembers that his
               correspondent might not know that "such a project" could have anything to do with the
               news. I am similarly compelled by the final misgiving in the quoted passage: poetry
               collecting "the commonplace" risks tedium. Had Stevens here eschewed his usual
               rhetoric of qualified assertions, I dare say the comment could be deemed unremarkable
               and I would be the first to cast it on a large pile of other comparable statements made
               by poets in the period, in a bin marked more easily said than done.

               But the Wallace Stevens whose 1930s Joseph Riddel rightly calls "the most revealing
               single period in his career"[34] was deadly serious when he spoke of poems
               responding "To What one reads in the papers." It simply cannot be denied that his
               comments in the months following the New Masses review suggest his wish to
               accommodate himself to certain assumptions of the literary left. These comments are
               too wide-ranging, and extend over too many letters, to be dismissed as whimsical. That
               he said he very much believed in "leftism," and hoped he was headed left (L 286-87),
               can perhaps be discounted as ironic or half-hearted, especially since he qualified the
               point by announcing that his left would not be "the ghastly left of MASSES." But he
               soon added that such contact as he had just had with the cultural radicals did allow a
               poet like himself to "circulate"--I use New Historicist pidgin here because Stevens
               did--and that it was in the last event "an extraordinarily stimulating thing" to find
               moving "in that milieu" (L 296). So, too, he deemed nonsense the notion some
               conservatives held that socialism and communism would "dirty the world" when
               carrying out their political transformations; although he admitted that the displeasure of
               dirtying would be the immediate effect, he significantly added that this would be true of
               any upheaval (L 292). At one point in this period he even permitted himself a bit of
               utopian thinking, speculating on what the world would look like if he were given the
               task of creating "an actuality" from scratch. He decided that it would look a good deal
               different from "the world about us" in many ways, though he declined to give the details
               of this vision; the prospect would merely be described in "personal terms," and he
               disliked people who spoke of such longing in personal terms (L 292). The
               "extraordinary experience" that contact with radicalism gave him led firmly to the
               conclusion that "one has to live and think in the actual world, and no other will do" (L
               292), a signal shift, at least rhetorically, from his attitude of the Harmonium years.
               Internal order proceeded from external order, he said, as well as the other way around;
               he added that "the orderly relations of society as a whole have a poetic value" (L 305).
               He began to emphasize references to the "normal" in his poetry. He became obsessed
               with "how to write of the normal in a normal way" (L 287), a process he knew would
               create the main difficulty if he were to adapt his verse to any of the new poetic realisms.

               Stevens also articulated the terms in which the advantages and disadvantages of
               "didactic poetry" and "[p]ure poetry" could be argued (L 302-03). While he admitted
               to his publisher that he clung to a "distinct liking" for pure poetry, his manner of saying
               so revealed his awareness that this was a position one could put forth only defensively
               in an era when radicals like Max Eastman were not-so-wildly attacking modernism as
               "The Tendency toward Pure Poetry" ("In place of a criticism ["of life," in Arnold's
               sense], these poets are offering us in each poem a moment of life, a rare, perfect or
               intense moment, and nothing more").[35] So Stevens, in saying now that he stood by
               pure poetry, insisted "at the same time" that "life is the essential part of literature" (L
               288). Acknowledging "the common opinion" of his verse, that it was essentially
               decorative, he wished to counteract such a criticism by challenging the very terms
               decorative and formal (L 288). Asked to look back on his own "Comedian as the
               Letter C" (1922), he realized that, much as Malcolm Cowley had recently proposed in
               the last pages of Exile's Return (1934), there was a distinct cultural construction of the
               recent aesthetic past, a twenties for the thirties. Stevens judged the obsession with the
               sound of poetry in "Comedian" explainable by the fact that "subject," by which he
               meant content, had not been as important in the teens and twenties as it was in the
               thirties (L 294). With hindsight granted by just six months, he glanced back at "Mozart,
               1935," and decided that it took up the issue of "the status of the poet in a disturbed
               society" (L 292).

               In each cultural period--high modern, radical, wartime, postwar--Stevens wielded a
               stock response in part to fend off further queries from correspondents. Before the
               thirties his response was, I write poems to become more myself. But immediately after
               the Burnshaw encounter, at the height of the radical moment, this line became: I write
               poems in order to formulate my ideas about and to discern my relation to the
               world.[36] (When I asked Stanley Burnshaw if he would comment on my suggestion
               "that Stevens changed his attitude toward his own poetry because of [Burnshaw's]
               political response to it," he replied: "[Stevens] did want to prove that he was of the
               world and that he was responding to what I was referring to as reality. I don't think
               there can be any doubt about it."[37]) Most important--and I will return in the second
               half of this book to the precise points of impact--Stevens was speaking for the first time
               of the poet's link to Burnshaw's sense of reality as interactive. A poet saw poetry as
               helping to create what it sought in the world of events; this incessant change in
               language's relation to that world was in itself a reason why he or she could persist
               poetically "now," in this historically-minded moment, both marking history and being
               marked by history's traces: a dialogism between foreground and background, between
               the poem and its sometimes explicitly posited now, devised not in spite of but because
               of contemporary "complexity" (L 300).

               My argument takes its first cue from Stevens's own contingent sense of "complexity":
               just when it was in the noncommunist writer's special interest to turn toward radicalism,
               however tentatively and self- servingly, it happened that it was in the special interest of
               communist writers to involve him or her. Such coincidental shifting, it must first be
               realized, would have surprised few cultural figures then in the know, much as the
               convergence might seem astonishing today. One need only confer with any of the many
               surviving fellow travelers willing to talk about their radicalizations to be reminded, as I
               was when interviewing Jerre Mangione, that "nearly everyone associated with writing
               and publishing whom one knew and respected was interested in some form of
               radicalism--and communism was always at least in the background."[38] The
               interaction, moreover, between noncommunists like Stevens and the literary-political
               forces of their time--forces set routinely into motion by journal editors, other poets, and
               especially reviewers--was remarkably dynamic. The new historicists' vaunted problem
               of seeing the tree and the woods (rather than one "for" the other), of circulating notions
               of background and foreground, could not be acuter than in such an instance.[39]

               Though it is never a matter confessed in print by the many otherwise perspicacious
               readers of Stevens's 1930s volumes, Ideas of Order (1935), Owl's Clover (1936),
               and The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems (1937), it has always seemed, I
               think, that for the purposes of studying the eminent modernist's defensive rhetoric, and
               to keep from losing one's way in the tangle of the thirties' literary left, one must steadily
               restrict oneself as a critic to the modernist's view of these extrapoetic forces. Such a
               procedure, while sensible if not unassailable, has given us just half the picture of the
               noncommunist's thirties. And it has reduced to simplicities the relation between on one
               hand the poet deemed utterly unique or uncommon and, on the other hand, what would
               seem to be the minor, ephemeral, even grubby, and finally inconsequential, aesthetic
               tactics used by mostly unremembered men and women. What does it matter, in
               assessments of figures like Williams, Moore, and Stevens still judged major a
               half-century later, if that common minority of poetic special interests behaves
               incorrigibly as a background? I have written Modernism from Right to Left believing
               that it matters a great deal. It is no less significant, I think, to come at singular poets like
               Stevens from that incorrigible, messy background, and (to mix and transpose the
               metaphor in this book's title) advance the analysis from back to front as well as right to
               left--in short, to find those sundry other poets', editors', and reviewers' arrogations of
               Stevens and modernism to have served their ends both perceived and unsuspected,
               even as (or perversely because) these ends seem forgettable in relation to Stevens's
               achievements, not nearly worth the tremendous effort and time required for
               documented retrieval. Yet in making literary-political use of him, after all, they
               constructed the setting in which he was read by still others, and in which he read
               himself. This is only most famously the case with the New Masses review provoking
               four-fifths of Stevens's longest poem. The same kind of effects, I will suggest along the
               way, result from the assaults by Orrick Johns on Moore, Willard Maas on E. E.
               Cummings, Mike Gold on Archibald MacLeish, Edwin Seaver on Horace Gregory,
               Eda Lou Walton on Robinson Jeffers, and Burnshaw, Johns, and H. H. Lewis on
               Harriet Monroe's Poetry.

               There are many other such convergences of modernism and radicalism to be described,
               and this book is organized to do so. To imagine Stevens, the recently promoted,
               three-piece-besuited vice- president of The Hartford Accident & Indemnity Company,
               reading himself in the Nation in the early autumn of 1936 is, after all, an intriguing
               act of "recovery" best aided by particulars that tend to show that the editors of that
               fellow-traveling journal certainly knew what they were doing when they awarded their
               annual poetry prize to a work that Stevens later said expressed sympathy with the
               antifascist republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Still later, after the falling out between
               the party-affiliated New Masses and a revived, freshly anti-Stalinist Partisan Review,
               the editors of the latter disputatious project knew exactly what cultural waves they
               were making when they solicited and received five poems from Stevens. One last
               preliminary example of cultural circulation contemporaneous with the Steven-Burnshaw
               fracas, was the publication of three poems in the New Republic, whose literary editor,
               namely Cowley, was suggesting that communism "can offer [the writer] an audience,
               not trained to appreciate the finer points of style or execution . . . but larger and
               immeasurably more eager than the capitalist audience."[40] With Cowley's appointment
               to succeed Edmund Wilson at the New Republic, as was well known in both literary
               and political circles, the columns of this "weekly became a playground of the proletarian
               artists and critics."[41] As I will show in Chapter 5, Cowley's timely use of
               Stevens--Stevens's appearance on just such a "playground"--was strategic in the
               ordinary but not in the extraordinary sense; that is to say, the red-hot Cowley, busier
               then than ever, would not have given a second thought to the ideological significance of
               this otherwise odd-seeming meeting. And this is precisely why such meetings must be
               given a long second thought here. The relationship between Stevens and the New
               Republic resulted from just one of innumerable forays of aesthetic left into right. It was
               a small but signal provision in a fundamental unspoken agreement by which writers,
               literary journalists, and cultural politicians traded freely on each other's rhetorics. That
               process, called "historical" in every possible high and low sense, stipulated a good deal
               more ideological commingling than has ever been credited to it. In an aesthetic era
               driven by a presumptuous feeling of "history" boldly being made, basically pleasurable
               in ways often denied, there was a lot of "merely circulating" going on.