Cold War Politics and American Poetry

Between the end of WWII in 1945 and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, American poetry underwent a profound transformation. Poets like Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde began writing about shame, madness, women’s bodies, homosexuality, and race—subjects that had been largely invisible in American poetry. These poets were rebelling against the social conformism that attended the Cold War ideology of “containment.” At the same time, the ideal of artistic freedom became central to American cultural diplomacy abroad, including the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom’s efforts to promote American intellectual and artistic culture as a counterweight to Soviet totalitarianism. In this course, we will explore the relationship between Cold War politics and American poetry, and grapple with the following questions: How did Cold War anti-communism shape American postwar poetry? What relationships emerged between poets and state power? How did midcentury American poets write about war, nuclear anxiety, surveillance, madness, gender, and race? How did these writers challenge dominant American narratives of freedom and democracy? What happens when they exercised their rights as “free” Americans to dissent from authority? And finally, what was their legacy and lasting effect upon American culture?