The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts DOCUMENTARY POETRY AND AMERICAN MODERNISM FROM THE DEPRESSION TO WORLD WAR 2 A Dissertation in English by Julius Lobo © 2011 Julius Lobo Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2011 ii The dissertation of Julius Lobo was reviewed and approved* by the following: Robin Schulze Head of the Department of English Professor of English Dissertation Co-Adviser Mark Morrisson Director of Graduate Studies Professor of English and of Science, Technology, and Society Dissertation Co-Adviser Aldon Nielsen Kelly Professor of American Literature Jeffrey T. Nealon Liberal Arts Research Professor of English John Marsh Assistant Professor of English Adam Rome Associate Professor of History *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. iii Abstract This dissertation argues that American modernist poets sought out and incorporated innovations from documentary film, photography, and traditions of testimonial witness in an effort to create poetry that could engage and respond to contemporary political and social issues. Documentary art and media dominated American mass culture between the Depression and World War 2, and poets seized upon the cultural authority and semblance of objectivity that documentary provided for their work. Recent scholars have recognized the importance of documentary to American modernist art and literature, yet the productive relationship between documentary and American modernist poetry has been overlooked. This thesis will show that documentary poetics is essentially an interdisciplinary practice, borrowing and adapting developments from film and photography in order to shape a variety of source materials. American documentary poets also experimented with a myriad of primary resources, ranging from presidential letters, legal reports, government hearings, historical and political texts, and eyewitness accounts, while simultaneously experimenting with poetic form and arrangement. This study ultimately seeks to establish the importance of documentary poetry and its engagement with the politics and culture of the 1930s and 40s. In doing so, it makes the following threefold argument: that documentary poetry is an important aspect of the history and development of American literary modernism; that documentary poetry is a prominent documentary art alongside photography, film, and other visual arts; and finally that documentary poetry serves as a significant barometer of social change, demonstrating how poetic practices iv articulated and responded to various political movements throughout the decades under consideration. In particular, this thesis examines the work of five poets writing between the Depression and World War 2: Joseph Kalar, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Muriel Rukeyser, and John Beecher. In chapter one, on Joseph Kalar and his proletarian sketch poetry written for New Masses, I discuss how his poetic sketches reveal the diversity of cultural and political attitudes found in the American working class of the late 1920s, and how his documentary work feeds into the larger worker-correspondent system that was being developed for the magazine. In chapter two, on Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky’s competing documentary histories of the United States, I show how their respective fascist and socialist political ideologies frame the wide range of historical texts that they weave into their poetic documentaries. In chapter three, on Muriel Rukeyser’s documentary project on the Gauley Bridge mining disaster, I examine her projected adaptation of her poem “The Book of the Dead” as a documentary film, “Gauley Bridge.” In chapter four, on John Beecher’s New Deal documentary poems, I investigate how he incorporated his field reports as an administrator for the FSA and FEPC into his poetry. Finally, in a brief epilogue, I discuss the trajectory of American documentary poetics after 1945. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction 1 1 Joseph Kalar, New Masses, and the Development of Proletarian 14 Documentary Poetry 2 Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky’s Documentary Histories of the 46 United States in the Eleven New Cantos and “A”-8 3 From Verse to Screen: Muriel Rukeyser’s Documentary Film 81 Adaptations of “The Book of the Dead” and the Rise and Fall of the Popular Front 4 John Beecher’s Documentary Poetics of the New Deal 116 Epilogue 157 Works Cited 163 vi Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Dolinger Family, the College of the Liberal Arts, and the Penn State English Department for their support and funding. The fellowships and grants I received made it possible to travel and conduct archival research at the Library of Congress and the Mandeville Special Collections at the University of California, San Diego. Additionally, special thanks to Bill Brockman at the University Park Arts and Humanities Library for obtaining microfilms of John Beecher’s papers and correspondence, which were invaluable to my conceptualization of that chapter. For their support and help at various stages of my project, I would like to thank my dissertation committee: Robin Schulze, Mark Morrisson, Aldon Nielsen, Jeffrey Nealon, and John Marsh. I would also like to thank my mother and father, and my brothers. Throughout this long and rigorous journey you have kept me sane and made me feel at home, no matter where I was. Finally, the greatest share of thanks goes to my wife, Giuseppina, who patiently listened to all my complaints and frustrations along the way. Without her intellectual and emotional support, this project would not have been possible. 1 Introduction: A Background to American Documentary Poetry, 1929-1945 The period between the start of the Depression and the conclusion of World War 2 marked a strong engagement with documentary in the visual and literary arts in the United States. The desire to record the social and cultural landscape of the country emerged from a variety of political and economic developments, beginning with the market crash of 1929. Documentary photography, which had gained national attention in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the efforts of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, became a fixture in magazines and periodicals such as U.S. Camera, Fortune, and Life, revealing the hardships of the Depression to their audiences.1 Additionally, the New Deal incorporated photography as a means to document its public works projects in order to show its successes and the necessity for further government action. The photographs taken under the auspices of the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration were made popular in documentary photo-text works such as Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor‘s An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939) and James Agee and Walker Evans‘ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).2 Documentary film and newsreels also featured workers and farmers afflicted by the Depression and unemployment. In the early 1930s, the Workers‘ Film and Photo League of America produced documentary films in an effort to record the hunger marches, 1 Jacob Riis‘ How The Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890) was a groundbreaking work of photojournalism that documented the harsh life of the New York slums and tenements. Lewis Hine‘s work for the National Child Labor Committee (1908-1918) brought attention to practices of child labor in American industry. See Raeburn 13-14 for a discussion of the inclusion of documentary photography in American periodicals and magazines in the 1930s. 2 Both Lange and Evans worked for the RA and the FSA documenting the poverty of American sharecroppers and farmers. For more information on American documentary photography between the Depression and World War 2, see Maren Strange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950 and James Curtis, Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered. 2 breadlines, and masses of unemployed workers.3 The League‘s documentary films borrowed heavily from newsreels and were, in effect, compilations of spliced footage. As the New Deal became involved in documentary film production and the budgets increased, American documentary film became more developed and reached a broader audience. The most prominent examples of the commercial success of documentary film were Pare Lorentz‘s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), which both benefited from New Deal administrative support and large-scale distribution.4 The onset of World War 2 shifted the focus of American documentary arts from the Depression to the wars on the European continent and Pacific, as well as the effort to build workforces for the defense industry. As unemployment decreased due to mobilization and increasing job opportunities in war industries, photographic and filmic images of American unity and solidarity replaced images of unemployed workers and desperate farmers.5 Documentary photographers self-consciously emphasized sacrifice and the willingness to fight in both the theatres of war and within the war industry plants at home. Scenes of war were shown in theaters across the United States in newsreels, while filmmakers such as John Ford and Frank Capra presented gritty episodes of battle within their documentaries.6 These 3 The Workers‘ Film and Photo League was recognized by the Communist International and received financial support from the Workers‘ International Relief. The League‘s film style reflected Soviet documentary aesthetics, which emphasized the use of spliced and juxtaposed footage over dramatically rendered scenes. For more on the League see Barsam 146-47 and Campbell 29-70. 4 For more information on the promotion and success of The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River, see Barsam 156-57. 5 See Raeburn‘s discussion of ―Images of America‖ (1941) and the differences between earlier FSA exhibits, which featured extended treatments of unemployed workers and farmers (191). 6 ―The March of Time‖ (1935-51) and ―This is America‖ (1942-51) are important examples of the newsreel that brought carefully edited information about World War 2 to thousands of American theatres.