Lyric diplomacy: Cold War poetics in the United States and West Germany 1945--1955

In my dissertation I challenge the limitations of examining postwar poetry within the nation-state by uncovering the transatlantic context in which poetic values and institutions were reformulated after 1945.1 argue that mid-century poetry--much like literary modernism---is understood best as an international response to cultural crisis. First, I claim that the lyric's expression of subjectivity---its withdrawal from the instrumental rhetoric of politics---became its most valuable asset after the war. In an age when partisan art was discredited by Stalinism and fascism, Western intellectuals and poets reclaimed lyric poetry as a form of utopian, "non-ideological' discourse. Next, I offer a historiography of the participation of poets like Robert Lowell, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger in transatlantic organizations, such as The Partisan Review, Encounter, the Salzburg Seminars in American Civilization, and the Congresses for Cultural Freedom. I explain how poets acted as cultural diplomats in these institutions and how their arguments about poetry's postwar purpose helped consolidate the anti-communist consensus in the West. I conclude my dissertation by examining lyric language's renewal after 1945. I argue that poets as different in sensibility as Gunter Eich, Charles Olson, Donald Davie and Elizabeth Bishop wrote a verse framed by the "zero hour" rhetoric of transatlantic cultural reconstruction.