Poetry Makes You Happen: American from Modernism to the Social Movement

Modernist poetry has long had a reputation for craft formalism and political conservatism that overshadows its radical legacies. Lukas Moe shows how midcentury US poets and poetics drew upon leftwing culture to pave the way for diversity and pluralism in contemporary poetry. Poets used modernist forms to write poems of individual dissent and systemic critique that resonated with the ambitious visions of social movements in postwar US society. Audre Lorde’s sense that poetry “makes you happen”—a remix of W. H. Auden’s old saw that ”poetry makes nothing happen"—exemplifies the power of what Moe calls verse culture: the archives, networks, and print media that sustain individual poetic creation and collective imagination. By resituating authors such as Sterling A. Brown, Robert Hayden, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, and Muriel Rukeyser into a fluid political network of commitment and dissent, Moe narrates a compelling literary political history that deepens our understanding of what poetry can do in difficult times.