Poetry Makes You Happen: American Poetry from Modernism to the Social Movement

Modernist poetry has long had a reputation for craft formalism and political conservatism that overshadows its radical legacies. Lukas Moe shows how midcentury US poets and poetics drew upon leftwing culture to pave the way for diversity and pluralism in contemporary poetry. Poets used modernist forms to write poems of individual dissent and systemic critique that resonated with the ambitious visions of social movements in postwar US society. Audre Lorde’s sense that poetry “makes you happe...