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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets
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The Degenerate Muse - American Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,273
Discovery Miles 22 730
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The Degenerate Muse - American Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene (Hardcover)
Series: Modernist Literature and Culture
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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This book offers an important reconsideration of the cultural
impulses that drove American literary modernism. America's
modernist poets came of age in a nation struggling to redefine its
relationship with poetry and with nature. In the early twentieth
century, Darwinian science dictated that as countries became more
civilized, as their citizens dwelt increasingly in the realms of
artifice they created, they ceased to engage in the invigorating
struggles against nature that kept them fit. Civilization led to
the medical condition known as degeneration, the morbid deviation
of men from an identifiable "normal type." Eager to save America
from the fate of a degenerate Europe, Progressive Era reformers
prescribed the invigorating contact with American nature as a means
to keep the American race clean and healthy. In order for nature to
serve as an antidote for degeneration, however, it needed to remain
a realm of hard facts and unremitting forces, a delusion-free place
free of art that cleansed the mind rather than clouded it. Drawing
on a wide range of primary and archival sources, this book argues
that the widespread American turn back to nature in the early
twentieth century had profound consequences for America's modernist
poets. Like other Americans of their day, Harriet Monroe, Ezra
Pound, and Marianne Moore heeded the widespread American call to
head back to nature for the sake of the nation's health, but they
faced a difficult challenge. Turning to American nature as a means
to combat the threat of American degeneration in their literary
work, they needed to create a form of American poetry that would be
a cure for degeneration rather than a cause. My work reveals the
ways in which Monroe's, Pound's, and Moore's struggles to create
and publish poems that could resist degeneration by keeping faith
with American nature influenced ideas about what American poetry
should be and do in the twentieth century.
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