Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left

<em>Revolutionary Memory</em> is the most important book yet to be published about the vital tradition of leftwing American Poetry. As <strong>Cary Nelson</strong> shows, it is not only our image of the past but also our sense of the present and future that changes when we recover these revolutionary memories. Making a forceful case for political poetry <em>as</em> poetry, <strong>Nelson</strong> brings to bear his extraordinary knowledge of American poets, radical movements, and social struggles in order to bring out an undervalued strength in a literature often left at the canons edge. Focused in part of the red decade of the 1930s, <em>Revolutionary</em> <em>Memory</em> revitalizes biographical criticism for writers on the margin and shows us for the first time how progressive poets fused their work into a powerful chorus of political voices. Richly detailed and beautifully illustrated with period engravings and woodcuts, <em>Revolutionary Memory</em> brings that chorus dramatically to life and set a cultural agenda for future work.