The Politics and Poetics of Revolution

doi:10.1017/9781009180047.005

Chapter 4 - The Politics and Poetics of Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2023

Mark Steven

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Daniel Morris

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Daniel Morris: Affiliation:
Purdue University, Indiana

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Summary

If poetry is the imperfect approximation of ungovernable forces and feelings, a revolt from within and against the distribution of the sensible, there will have always been something poetic about revolutionary possibility in the United States. And yet American poetry has often understood social revolution as an alien phenomenon, a foreign concept in the most literal sense of that term. When Walt Whitman pressed for “quenchless, indispensable fire” with his “Songs of Insurrection,” he only did so with thoughts cast far away from home and to Paris in the year of its Commune. “Then courage!” we read in his 1871 cluster. “European revolter! revoltress!” (632).

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900 , pp. 69 - 85

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009180047.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023

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