Criticism and the Justification of Modernism

Evan Kindley's Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture traces the process by which modernist poets between 1920 and 1950 transitioned from opposition against mainstream institutions to their integration into those institutions as poet-critics. Kindley asserts that it was the intentional choices of modernists seeking to preserve and justify their art that produced poetry's position in American society today. To tell this tale, he examines how T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Sterling Brown, and R.P. Blackmur operated in relation to academia, federal programs, and philanthropic foundations, ultimately rendering poets useful to a bureaucratic management of American culture. Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture provides a rich overview of a figure that has been ignored, the poet-administrator whose labors made the later dominance of poet-critics appear inevitable.