During the Cold War an unlikely coalition of poets, editors, and politicians converged in an attempt to discredit--if not destroy--the American modernist avant-garde. Ideologically diverse yet willing to bespeak their hatred of modern poetry through the rhetoric of anticommunism, these "anticommunist antimodernists," as Alan Filreis dubs them, joined associations such as the League for Sanity in Poetry to decry the modernist "conspiracy" against form and language. In Counter-revolution of the Word Filreis narrates the story of this movement and assesses its effect on American poetry and poetics. Although the antimodernists expressed their disapproval through ideological language, their hatred of experimental poetry was ultimately not political but aesthetic, Filreis argues. By analyzing correspondence, decoding pseudonyms, drawing new connections through the archives, and conducting interviews, Filreis shows that an informal network of antimodernists was effective in suppressing or distorting the postwar careers of many poets whose work had appeared regularly in the 1930s. Insofar as modernism had consorted with radicalism in the Red Decade, antimodernists in the 1950s worked to sever those connections, fantasized a formal and unpolitical pre-Depression High Modern moment, and assiduously sought to de-radicalize the remnant avant-garde. Filreis's analysis provides new insight into why experimental poetry has aroused such fear and alarm among American conservatives.

Counter-revolution of the Word is about conservatives' attempt to destroy the modernist avant-garde in the anticommunist period after World War II. The antagonists readers will meet in these pages by no means constitute a monolithic force. They were not ideologically of a kind. But aesthetically. Well, yes, aesthetically they were more or less unified; they knew what they formally opposed, and the narrative of that surprising unity lies at the center of this study. A few of these people did work together, such as the band of poets and poetry editors - most of them reactionary antimodernists - that the prolific Stanton Coblentz helped assemble under the banner of the League for Sanity in Poetry. Others among Coblentz's colleagues, however, would not have recognized themselves as allies; quite aside from their hatred of modern poetry, differences between them - academic, theoretical, personal - would have gotten in the way. To my knowledge, this is the first book written about the overall effects of actual anticommunism on modernist American poetry and poetics. Such a blank in our understanding of American art and artists has its specific causes. A main cause is the apparent disappearance of the evidence for links between and among disparate, truculent McCarthyite elements in the poetry world and their ''communist poet'' enemies and the modernist experimenters who have not been known to have connections to the communist movement.