Dynamics of Politicization in the Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry Field by Barış Büyükokutan A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology) in The University of Michigan 2010 Doctoral Committee: Professor George P. Steinmetz, Chair Professor Howard A. Kimeldorf Professor Alan M. Wald Professor Michael D. Kennedy, Brown University Professor Gisèle Sapiro, Centre national de la recherche scientifique © Barış Büyükokutan 2010 To my mother ii Acknowledgements Many people helped me directly and indirectly over my eight years at Michigan. George Steinmetz, my principal advisor, allowed me to pursue my interests wherever they went while not failing to make some very fateful interventions that decisively shaped my work for the better. Howard Kimeldorf was always there when I needed his advice, always supportive, and always the first to respond to my queries. Gisèle Sapiro gave valuable advice during the research stage. Alan Wald and Michael Kennedy, the remaining members of my dissertation committee, were helpful and available. Müge Göçek, my former advisor, trusted my instincts; Peggy Somers gave much-needed support during the coursework stage; and Nükhet Sirman constantly reminded me of other perspectives that I could easily have forgotten as a result of disciplinary isolation. Poets Neeli Cherkovski, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joanne Kyger, Ron Loewinsohn, and Gary Snyder kindly spent time with me, answering my numerous questions. I owe much to Ann Arbor friends: Shpresa and Besnik Pula, Lai Sze Tso, Heejin Jun, Sadia Saeed, Atef Said, Camilo Leslie, Kristen Hopewell, Mariana Craciun, Maria Farkas, Ethan Schoolman, David Dobbie, Claire Decoteau, Hiro Saito, Avi Astor, Cedric Deleon, Matt Desan, Eric Eide, Marco Garrido, Alex Gerber, Kim Greenwell, Claire Whitlinger, Elizabeth Young, Meagan Elliott, and Dan Hirschman. The “Young Turks” of Ann Arbor – Mücahit Bilici, Burçak Keskin, Aslı Gür, Aslı Iğsız, Deniz Erkmen, iii Cihan Tuğal – deserve special mention. Kurtuluş Gemici, Zeynep Atalay, and Halim Kucur provided me with different views of scholarship at times I needed them, and their friendship was invaluable in surviving life after leaving the most beautiful campus on earth. Conversations with Mehmet Saner were always predictably inspiring. Donna Champine, Tom Morson and Haju Sunim taught me to see life’s goals in a different, less oppressive way, and in so small degree contributed to the formation of my ideas. Friends in Istanbul – Ali Oğuz Meriç, Neşe Uyanık, and Ece Özbaylı in particular – kept me grounded in my hometown, rushed to my help every time I asked, and gave me something to look forward to outside publish-or-perish. Finally, my family. My father, Ünal Büyükokutan, was sometimes more interested in my research than I was, a rare phenomenon in academia. My grandparents, Östen and Halil İbrahim Yaşar, supported me in a way that only they could. Lastly, my mother, Melek Yaşar, is the single greatest influence on this dissertation. She supported me in innumerable ways, always believed in me, and eventually became my best reader. This dissertation would have been impossible without her; it is dedicated to her. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication…………………………………………………………………………...……ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………iii List of tables………………………………………………………………………...……vi Chapter 1. Introduction……………………………………………………………...……..1 2. U.S. Poetry Field in the Twentieth Century: Structure and History………….29 3. “Autonomy From What?” Universities, Popular Taste, The State, and the Poetry Field, 1910-1975………………………………………………...85 4. Two Paths of Politicization in the Poetry Field: Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell during the Vietnam Period……………………………………..139 5. Dynamics of Backstage Activity: Buddhism and the Poetry Field………….188 6. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...254 Appendix: Guide to U.S. Poets and Poetry Movements Mentioned…………………...274 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………300 v LIST OF TABLES Table 3.1. Leading academics and antiacademics during the 1940s and early 1950s.....106 Table 3.2. Leading academics and antiacademics in the late 1950s……………………110 Table 3.3. Poets of the Vietnam antiwar movement……………………………………121 Table 3.4. The second generation of New Criticism…………………………………...123 Table 3.5. U.S. poetry institutions……………………………………………………...127 Table 3.6. Major poetry awards………………………………………………………...128 Table 4.1. Inherited economic capital and political effectiveness among selected U.S. poets…………………………………………………………………………….152 Table 4.2. Inherited cultural capital and political effectiveness among selected U.S. poets…………………………………………………………………………….153 Table 4.3. Network affiliation and political effectiveness among selected U.S. poets…155 Table 4.4. Frontstage vs. backstage actions…………………………………………….162 Table 5.1. Philosophical/religious resources of backstage activity in the poetry field after 1945……………………………………………………………………………..196 Table 5.2. Buddhism and the poets of the Vietnam peace movement………………….197 Table 5.3. U.S. poets and religious and philosophical traditions in the postwar period..200 Table 5.4. Neopaganism in the poetry field…………………………………………….218 Table 5.5. Leading Catholic poets of the postwar period………………………………221 Table 5.6. Social class and the leading U.S. poets of the Buddhism nexus…………….223 Table 5.7. Poets of the Buddhism nexus and the academicism debate…………………233 vi Table 6.1. Four views of the intellectual..........................................................................261 Table 6.2. Cases of literary/political success in twentieth-century U.S. poetry vs. organic, total, specific, and collective intellectual.............................................................270 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1. Introduction How can dissenting intellectuals – writers, artists, and scientists who lack direct access to economic or political power and who disagree strongly with the policies formulated by actors with these kinds of power – gain social, cultural and political influence, as a group or individually? While “policy intellectuals” – intellectuals who have internalized the reason of the state as their own raison d’être – and market intellectuals – those whose brand of cultural production follows and reinforces prevailing tastes and the preconceptions embedded in them rather than challenging them – have no problem in being heard and taken seriously, the expertise that other intellectuals can credibly claim in the public sphere has little relevance to the immediate concerns of life. Should they decide to attempt crossing this divide, furthermore, the resources they accumulate in the course of their pursuit of aesthetic and scientific excellence – assuming that this is a genuine desire – are of little help. As a result, this kind of intellectual typically has to choose between being perceived as “a full-time Cassandra, who was not only righteously unpleasant but also unheard” and giving up his/her ideals and becoming “just a friendly technician” (Said 1994:69). At first sight, this is a question that has little importance or urgency for scholars of U.S. history and society. Either the American intellectual is a feeble creature that has 1 only himself/herself to blame for his/her situation, some scholars tell us and the public seems to concur, or the term is an outright oxymoron. The American intellectual, in this view, has achieved little in the public realm by comparison to his/her illustrious continental cousins, who can boast of a long string of victories and honorable defeats from the Dreyfus affair in France to the postcommunist revolutions of Eastern Europe. They have succumbed, more than any other group of intellectuals, to professionalization, academization, and the commodification of culture, giving up the defense of truth for a safe but sterile comfort zone. And yet, I will argue throughout this dissertation, dissenting U.S. poets in the twentieth century commanded considerable influence in the public sphere on numerous occasions while building an art that, many believe, is bound for extinction in the age of high (or post-) modernity. They managed to hold on to their space as Stalinism and the state threatened them from two sides in the 1930s; gained a toehold in universities in the 1930s and 40s; and used this toehold to enrich poetry institutions and to increase the status of poetry among the arts. This “infrastructure of influence” allowed other poets to challenge mainstream culture in the 1950s and 1960s and to make it harder for the U.S. government to wage war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. 1.2. On the Death and Life of the American Intellectual The “death of the American intellectual” seems a valid thesis at the outset. Focusing on the group of predominantly Jewish writers who gathered around journals like Partisan Review, Dissent, and Commentary in the 1930s, Jacoby (1987) argues convincingly that these “New York intellectuals” reneged from their social function after 2 World War II, unable to resist cooptation by universities. The bohemia, which could have shocked them back to life, also failed to play its part and allowed the commodifying impulse of the “sixties counterculture” to take over. Edward Said makes an elegant case that professionalization, the attitude to think of intellectual work as something one does from nine to five, produces a drift to power and authority (1994:73-88), and the U.S. is, in all likelihood, the place where professionalization is valued most. Jacoby and Said’s accounts