University of Kentucky UKnowledge University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2004 THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY: PLURALISM AND APPALACHIA, 1937-1946 Christopher Allen Green University of Kentucky, [email protected] Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Green, Christopher Allen, "THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY: PLURALISM AND APPALACHIA, 1937-1946" (2004). University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations. 349. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/gradschool_diss/349 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Christopher Allen Green The Graduate School University of Kentucky 2004 THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY: PLURALISM AND APPALACHIA, 1937-1946 ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky By Christopher Allen Green Lexington, Kentucky Director: Dr. Dale Bauer, Professor of English Lexington, Kentucky 2004 Copyright © Chris Green 2004 ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY: PLURALISM AND APPALACHIA, 1937-1946 This dissertation demonstrates how poetry about Appalachia expanded American considerations of democracy, ethnicity, and cultural values. I argue that poetry is profoundly communal in its construction and investigate how the value of poetry changes based upon its transfer through varying networks of production, circulation, and reception. Informed by theories of cultural capital and rhetoric, the chapters trace three books of poetry from their composition and publication to their reception and influence, noting how central political and social institutions and individuals shaped that process. The dissertation establishes how the poets crafted their writing to sway specific interpretive communities’ attitudes on pluralism. In Hounds on the Mountain (Viking, 1937), James Still sang about the erosion of the quiet earth for the liberal, middleclass readers of The Atlantic. In U. S. 1 (Covici·Friede, 1938), Muriel Rukeyser wrote about the deaths of migrant and African-American miners, the Spanish Civil War, and the threat of fascism for popular-front readers of The New Republic, Poetry, and the New Masses. In Clods of Southern Earth (Boni and Gaer, 1946), Don West catalyzed resistance in an interracial readership of southern (and mountain) sharecroppers and factory workers. In each case, the complex interrelations between history, authors, and readers show their mutually transformative effects on pluralism. Within American pluralism from1900 to 1948, my work reveals the vital relations between established ethnicities—African- American, Jewish, Anglo, American Indian, and Southern—and Appalachia. My account follows the concrete connections of pluralism from Plessy vs. Ferguson’s judicial theory of racial purity, through a cultural pluralism based on national origins during WWI, to the Harlem Renaissance, and ends with an examination of regional pluralism in the 1930s. Appalachia was then often understood as preserving remnants of a premodern America, and the authors about whom I write used it to authenticate the values of community, which they felt to be endangered by the threats of modern dissociation, industrial exploitation, and fascist culture. Through close readings of poems in the three books, I establish Appalachia’s role in the discourse of modern American pluralism—the poetics of region and race. KEYWORDS: American Poetry, Cultural Studies, Reader-response Criticism, Multiculturalism, Appalachian Region Christopher A. Green April 20, 2004 THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY: PLURALISM AND APPALACHIA, 1937-1946 By Christopher Allen Green Dale M. Bauer Director of Dissertation Dale M. Bauer Director of Graduate Studies April 20, 2004 RULES FOR USE OF DISSERTATIONS Unpublished dissertations submitted for the Doctor’s degree and deposited in the University of Kentucky Library are as a rule open for inspection, but are to be used only with due regard to the rights of the authors. Bibliographical references may be noted, but quotations or summaries of part may be published only with the permission of the author, and with the usual scholarly acknowledgments. Extensive copying for publication of the dissertation in whole or in part also requires the consent of the Dean of the Graduate School of the University of Kentucky. DISSERTATION Christopher Allen Green The Graduate School University of Kentucky 2004 THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY: PLURALISM AND APPALACHIA, 1937-1946 DISSERTATION A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky By Christopher Allen Green Lexington, Kentucky Director: Dr. Dale Bauer, Professor of English Lexington, Kentucky 2004 Copyright © Chris Green 2004 For Jenny ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I extend deep appreciation to Dale Bauer because of her belief, wherewithal, and commitment. I also give gratitude to the quiet direction of Dwight Billings, whom can best be labeled a sage. And thanks to Janet Eldred for standing by me from word go, and thanks to Gordon Hutner for coming on board at the finale. And thanks as well to the Department of English and the University Graduate School, each of which funded my research and presentations around the country. On those travels, I was able to meet remarkable people and utilize essential archives. I bow to my fellow radical scholars: Rachel Rubin, Professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; Jim Lorence, Eminent Scholar of History, Gainesville College, GA; and James Smethurst, Professor of African-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I also bow to Clara Keyes, Special Collections Librarian, at Morehead State University; I bow to Pam Hackbart-Dean, Director, Southern Labor Archives, at the Pullen Library, Georgia State University; I bow to Ann Salter, Head Librarian at Oglethorpe University, which opened up new collections for me; I bow to Sara Wilson and LaLoria Konata who manned Special Collections at Atlanta University; I bow to Claire McGann, Manuscripts Librarian, at the University of Kentucky’s Special Collections & Archives; and I bow to Dave, Janitor for the Third Floor of the Young Library who granted me sanity. I also give my sincere appreciation to the Interlibrary Loan Librarians and Timothy Garrison, Borrowing Technician, at the University of Kentucky, who so quickly and ably brought in my varied, myriad requests. I send out unrelenting adorations to Kimmerle Green, my sister, who explored the Highlander Research and Education Center papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison; I adulate Craig Hobson, my brother-in-law, who took time from his own masters degree to scrounge into the depths of Claude Williams’ Papers at Wayne State University, Detroit. And I thank my parents—all six of them—whose support and love has kept me sane and my family healthy; throughout my lifetime, they have modeled for me what it means to give. My work also takes its place in a line of scholars whose work has inspired my own: Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (1989); Adrienne Rich’s What is Found There: Note Books on Poetry and Politics (1993); Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989); Henry D Shapiro’s Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in theAmerican iv Consciousness, 1870-1920 (1978); David Whisnat’s All That is Native and Fine: the Politics of Culture in an American Region (1983); Robert Dorman’s Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920-1945 (1993); and Julia S. Ardery’s The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and the Genesis of Twentieth-Century Folk Art (1998). Finally, praise be to Gurney Norman and the Gaines Center for the Humanities for first giving me room to love poetry, the world, and the academy all at the same time. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................ iv List of Tables ............................................................................................................................ viii List of Figures ........................................................................................................................... .. ix List of Files .................................................................................................................................. x Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1 Cultural Studies and Poetry ............................................................................................. 2 From Rhetorical Hermeneutics to the Cultural Field ...................................................... 3 Pragmatic Reader-Response Criticism ............................................................................ 5 Outline of the Dissertation .............................................................................................. 7 Post-Script: On Jesse Stuart ............................................................................................10