My manuscript examines 1960s U.S. poetry and the anxieties produced by threats that mass-mediated communications posed to poetic language, consciousness, and the conditions of possibility for political dissent. This historicist work draws on the theoretical work of Fredric Jameson, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Kittler, Guy Debord, and Cary Nelson, among others, to argue for a new understanding of the cultural and political functions of poetry at this politically volatile moment of late capital.
I show that the lyric, a genre popularly understood as short verse written in the first person that reveals something of the psychological state of its speaker, occupied a uniquely valuable literary-political position in the context of New Left psychopolitics. The use of New Critical reading strategies to exonerate Howl—which I explore through a close reading of the trial—marked a crucial transitional moment in which we can see criticism being deployed to legalize a new lyric poetry, a lyric whose insistence on frank discussion of the mind’s contents made possible the public exploration of individual consciousness that centered New Left politics in subsequent years. Following the Howl trial the lyric seemed to be a privileged genre for plumbing and expressing the depths of one’s consciousness, and thus poetry became an essential literary form for the New Left. The lyric became a legal space within which to explore aspects of consciousness that were formerly unutterable, and provided a form for the widespread communication of such exploration.
I argue moreover that the long tradition of imagining poetic language as transcendental, or somehow outside mediation, made poetry a site of intense interest as questions about mediation became increasingly political during the 1960s. For some political poets, like Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, poetry offered a problematic escape from vexing questions about the mediation of consciousness, and for others, such as Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka, it offered a uniquely positioned place from which to interrogate new theories about how the mass media controlled consciousness.
Despite these advantages, however, poetry as it had traditionally been published was poorly adapted for absorption into a mass-mediated culture increasingly reliant on both narrative and visuality. These poets, therefore, created performative texts that were often marginalized from mass-mediated culture; this had political benefits, as poetry was the major literary genre most removed from the capitalist culture that the New Left critiqued, but it also presented practical problems, because political efficacy in a democracy is inevitably tied to breadth of communication. It is within this anxious space that I examine the media theories and poetic work of politically committed poets, from the well-known to the unknown.