"The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts."
Willa Cather

   




Poems of the American Empire: The Lyric Form in the Long Twentieth Century by Jen Hedler Phillis is a well-researched thesis on the hybrid poetry and America's century.  Phillis is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her interests lie at the intersection of poetry and politics. Phillis's book manuscript, Lyric Histories, traces the appearance of history in American poems from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, arguing that careful attention to a lyric surface interrupted by primary historical documents, makes the history of politics and economics in the contemporary U.S. newly legible.

The twentieth century is a complex mix of sudden modernization, the fall of the Old World and the rise of the United States as a world power.  The twentieth century is also a short century when measured against period rather than years.  Many historians start the 20th century in 1914 at the start of World War I which destroyed the old empires and end the century in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union.  Industrialization, violent fighting that killed millions, revolution, technology, capitalism vs communism vs fascism, the collapse of the Eurocentric world, America's rise as a global power, the Cold War, and Mutually Assured Destruction all played a major role in the lives of practically everyone alive in the twentieth century.  Poetry about war ended with WWI, as there was nothing poetic about modern warfare.  We learned that "April is the cruelest month" and "Winter kept us warm."  An odd set of lines until one realizes that Eliot was referring to the unburied bodies on the European battlefield covered in snow.  The spring thaw is when the dead "reappear" to finally be buried in the now soft earth.

Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to his friend and collaborator Ezra Pound, and it is with Pound that Phillis begins her work with Pound.  The casual reader may have made ties to Pound and the politics and economics around him, but Phillis digs deep and shows that this is more than just a casual relationship.  They are forged together.  Pound may have been an easy start because he was very much a political person -- an American who relocated to Britain and then to Mussolini's Italy.  She next moves to William Carlos Williams who likewise broke with the strict order of poetry. The following chapters reach into modern times which have been less kind to America's interventions.  Poems of the American Empire presents lyric poetry of the twentieth century as history -- history in 3D or totality as the author describes it.  History and poetry do not exist side by side but rather intertwine.  Although not a collection of poetry, Phillis' introduction and extremely detailed documentation will give the reader plenty of opportunities to discover the poets and their poetry.

Well-researched and well-written literary criticism book, with poignant points of view and strong arguments that revises the fusion of epic and lyric possibilities of the contemporary American poetry.