the careful young men of 1957

In March of 1957, the Nation magazine ran a feature called "The Careful Young Men," with this subtitle: "Tomorrow's Leaders Analyzed by Today's Teachers." They sought contributions from English professors--all men as it turned out, not surprisingly--at mostly elite universities, soliciting comments on what students were thinking, writing and reading. These students, "tomorrow's leaders" per the subtitle, and the "careful young men" per the title, befit--lo and behold!--the general notion of Nation articles and editorials of this period: the Fifties were pretty much uniformly a time of quietude, caution and rising orthodoxy. That the late fifties was a time of extraordinary experimentation is nowhere indicated, not even marginally, not even in one sentence in one of the entries--not even as a hint or premonition. Of course I see the names of the contributors (Carlos Baker at Princeton, Stanley Kunitz of Queens College, Wallace Stegner at Stanford) and understand that a major problem here is the narrow choice of respondents. The obvious irony is that these male literary academics, for the most part lamenting the aesthetic conservatism of their students, evince no sense of the intellectual diversity--to mention only one form of diversity--that might be required to see the resistance and experimentation at the edges of their classrooms or perhaps outside their office windows or at the fringes of campus (or indeed far down the academic road, at places like Black Mountain). It may be that these gentlemen are writing in 1957 but thinking of their students of 1950-1954, the cowed McCarthyite generation recently graduated. Or it may be that the freer spirits on campus had stopped taking lit courses, or kept quiet whilst Stegner and Baker were lecturing at them, or saved their heterodoxy for the sloppy garrett and cheap coffee shop six blocks from campus.

Anyway, Kunitz notes that the students don't seem to have culture heroes who are themselves young, and seem to be stuck with Jung, Mann, Yeats and Eliot. Stegner claims that "only Eliot seems to arouse enthusiasm in students." (He's talking about a San Francisco-area campus in 1957! Can that generalization really hold even for students on the conservative Stanford campus of that time? I doubt it, but of course I'll need to do a little digging to confirm my hunch that he's wrong.) J. A. Bryant of the University of the South notes that the Hemingway these young men love is not the unallegiant expatriate Hem but the Hem who "symbolizes the virility and essential goodness of the American male and is identifiable with the warrior [and] the athlete." R. J. Kaufmann says that his students "like Joyce's Portrait very well up to the point in which he works out his elaborate aesthetic." John Willingham of Centenary College says there's no rebellion in these students at all--that they "envy the undergraduate of the twenties" [sic - not "the thirties"].

I should note that Leo Marx (then at Minnesota) wrote an exceptional piece for this feature, and so, to some degree, did Alan Swallow, whom we think of now as primarily a great publisher but who had then recently left the University of Denver but was in any case never really comfortable in the academy the way Stegner, Baker and Kunitz were.

cold-war poetry

At Franklin & Marshall's Writers House on March 10, 2010: A Lecture and Conversation: Al Filreis on "Some Poems of the Cold War: The Tranquilized 50s". "Come out from under your desks. In this hands-on session, Al Filreis will present several poems to explore together with participants within the milieu of the Cold War culture. Filreis is a Kelly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, the founder and Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Filreis is the author of 5 books on poetry, as well as numerous academic articles and essays. This event is free and open to the public." More...

poetry and jazz, 1957

Fabulous photograph taken by Life's photographer Nat Farbman. Kenneth Rexroth performs work from New Directions issue 15 at a poetry and jazz event in S.F., 1957. [Courtesy: the "Ordinary Finds" blog.]

ut pictura poesis descends a staircase

Here's X. J. Kennedy's "Nude Descending a Staircase," published in 1959 or 1960. From the title we know that Kennedy was in some sense at least rewriting or reworking the image of Duchamp's great early modern kinetic-cubist painting of the same name. I could go on and on about this poem as a 1950s-style poetical quietism. I won't here. Maybe what one can say on this score will be obvious. Whereas in the Duchamp the subject position is everywhere at once (we are seeing the nude from all angles - she moves and thus our rendering of her must be dynamic), here we are watching her from below - down the stairs. (In porn-ish pics I believe this is called "upskirt." Google that word and watch out.) From that vantage "we" watch her thighs rub together and although there's "the swinging air" the image is static. We've seen her, spied her. rendered her. Her descent is likened (it is not itself but something like it) and then, in the final line of the poem, the motion is not motion, but has a definitive end. Her motions are collected into a shape, a metered and rhymed who-has-zoomed-who unmistakable shape. This poem about a painting about constant mimesis-defying movement ironizes that kind of movement.

Here you go:

Nude Descending a Staircase

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to her parts go by.

One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

the c that precedes the choir

The newest PoemTalk is out now. Episode #14, a discussion of Wallace Stevens' late poem, "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself." Have a listen!

Share shares

Don Share's blog is "Squandermania and other foibles." Last month he wrote an entry about my book. He begins:

Like a number of folks I've been in touch with lately, I've been reading Al Filreis's fascinating new book, Counter-Revolution of the Word: the Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960, which shows that there was what we now call a right wing conspiracy against modernist poetry.

And ends:

sonnet written after the Swift Boating of Adlai

Here is an example of what the author of this sonnet called the "vituperative political style." It's awful but so wonderfully telling - and the final couplet is a hoot. (Click on the image of the typescript and see a readable version.)


A few days after the presidential elections of November 1956, the poet John Frederick Nims wrote a poem that he meant to be read only by his friend Henry Rago (the editor of Poetry magazine).

That November of course it was Adlai Stevenson - egghead, liberal, articulate, mild-mannered, the candidate who would not "go negative" against Ike know-nothingism - versus the just-mentioned Dwight Eisenhower, incumbent. Stevenson didn't have a chance. Ike sent Nixon (and Nixon's little proto-plumbers) out to Swift Boat poor hapless Adlai. It was ugly. (One of the rumors circulating about Adlai was that he was gay.)

Nims was one of those saddened by the result, politically hungover the next morning. In his letter to Rago, sent with the poem, he wrote: "Frankie [his son] burst into tears Wednesday morning when he heard Stevenson lost. Bonnie's bringing him up right."

Nims sent Rago a sonnet. To introduce it, he wrote: "Want to see a specimen of my vituperative political style? See enclosed sonnet." And added: "Needless to say, this is NOT a submission; no need to return." (The political sonnet was not Nims' known public style.)