LARB on Evan Kindley's Study of Writers Administrating Culture

At Los Angeles Review of Books, Bradley Babendir reviews Evan Kindley's Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture (Harvard University Press, 2017), a book which aims to tell how it came to be that so many poets become professors. "With the stories of a handful of prominent modernist poet-critics, he traces the shift in culture from the private stewardship of artists to their employment by academic institutions between the 1920s and ’50s," writes Babendir. Kindley focuses on Marianne Moore: "Moore’s writing demonstrated that she was not fond of negativity, and instead wanted to 'have power […] without taking up the cudgels.'" More about Moore:

This created a complicated problem for Moore, who knew that to “abjure any relation to the new society of modernist poet-critics […] would have been disastrous for [herself] as a relative newcomer to the world.” Still, Moore was admirably uncompromising in her artistic vision, and instead of bending to fit the poetic-critical whims of the time, she became the managing editor of The Dial, which, much like Moore, was often criticized for its pluralism and unwillingness to stake out a position on political or aesthetic matters. The role of editor was an appropriate manifestation of Moore’s critical perspective, one “not fundamentally about contentions, which are private and open to challenge, but about choices, which are private and not in need of external justification.”

Editing gave Moore a great deal of control over the shape of the literary world even when her contemporaries may have wished it hadn’t. Her power was aided by Scofield Thayer who ultimately became a co-owner of The Dial. In this case, private patronage was able to ameliorate the oppressive culture that would have otherwise prevented Moore’s ascendance, but it was never going to be a sustainable means of support to marginalized communities on a broad scale.

A viable alternative was the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) created by the Works Progress Administration in 1935 as part of the New Deal program, in which writers were put to work writing guidebooks. The FWP offered “women, writers of color, and other people ordinarily marginalized within literary culture […] an unprecedented […] opportunity to participate in American literary and cultural life.” For black writers and intellectuals in particular, the advantages and enfranchisement offered by the government “were often at odds with those of the African American intelligentsia, and those who worked in government were always vulnerable to accusations of compromise and betrayal from the black community at large.”

Read all about it at LARB.