'Not Sappho, Sacco:' Radicalism and resistance in American women's poetry, 1915-1945

"Not Sappho, Sacco: Radicalism and Resistance in American Women's Poetry 1915-1945" examines and recovers the work of three neglected feminist, radical voices: Lola Ridge (1873-1941), Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948), and Margaret Walker (1915-). It joins the ongoing discussion of Modernism's contested terrain and responds to Cary Nelson's contention that the canon of modern American poetry tells only one side of a more complex literary history of the poetries of the period. Ridge, Taggard, and Walker are representative of a neglected poetic discourse in America: left-oriented poets and poetry have been historically marginalized, buried by literary histories that classify either the "poem as object" popularized by the New Criticism, or the abstract disinterestedness found in poets such as T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore. I explore the alternative social spaces that Ridge, Taggard, and Walker created in their work; I perform close readings of their poems, reading them back into their historical, cultural, and political contexts. My project helps address a serious gap in the study of both modern American poetry and feminist criticism, by focusing specifically on the neglect of these significant women poets. Though recent studies have explored the work of male radicals, both in poetry and in fiction, very few studies have concentrated specifically on women's political poetry between the two world wars. My dissertation is the first that I know of to create a link between white (Ridge and Taggard) and black (Walker) women's radical lyrics by exploring both the interrelatedness of the political subjects on which the three poets wrote, and the interconnectedness of the radical discourses in which these women participated.;Read together, Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, and Margaret Walker produce a dialogue on social unrest. I utilize the interdisciplinary methods of New Historicism and Cultural Studies. I read these writers' poems intertextually with other non-literary texts such as investigative journalism, sociological studies, memoirs, and reminiscences of workers and activists. In addition, my readings of these poems show how they address historical issues about race, labor, immigration, modernity, and feminism. I focus on each poet in individual chapters. The chapter on Lola Ridge explores the poet's representation of the working class body in poems such as "Electrocution," "Frank Little at Calvary," "Lullaby," and the important long poem "The Ghetto." The chapter on Genevieve Taggard focuses on her Depression poetry as well as her activities as a radical and feminist public intellectual. The Margaret Walker chapter examines the influences of the Great Migration as well as Depression Chicago's radical climate on the poet's first book, For My People.