Sarah Ehlers's Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics is a necessary and refreshing contribution to the fields of New Modernist, cultural, and left literary studies. Ehlers's audacious first book focusses on the sometimes misunderstood, and always controversial, “red decade” of the 1930s. Building on the exploration of communism's influence in American interwar literature by scholars like Walter Kalaidjian, Michael Denning, and Alan Wald, Ehlers's study manages to excavate fallowed critical ground by reexamining “the buried, wasted, and lost remains of the procommunist presence in modern American poetics,” while postulating “alternate models for comprehending the interwar literary imagination” (2).Footnote ¹

Developed from Ehlers's doctoral dissertation “Red or Dead: States of Poetry in Depression America” (for which Wald was her adviser), Left of Poetry argues that prevailing critical paradigms for understanding 1930s leftist poetics fail to adequately account for the historical, political, and cultural complexities of the turbulent Depression era. Still tainted with the dregs of a supposedly debunked New Criticism, many contemporary operational models, for Ehlers, remain indebted to an apolitical, formalist approach to modernist study. In illuminating a diverse array of poetry and archival documents by leftist artists, Ehlers revisits material previously considered overtly propagandistic and challenges flat, utilitarian views of political poetry by unfurling its technical and stylistic innovations.

Left of Poetry consists of five chapters split into three parts, each of which deals with a particular characteristic “mode” of leftist interwar poetry. Chapters 1 and 2 are categorized under “Documentary,” an aesthetic that has become synonymous with artistic production during the Great Depression. Chapter 1, “Photography and the Development of Radical Poetics,” surveys Langston Hughes's underexplored photographic archive. Extracted in large part from the Langston Hughes Papers at Yale's Beinecke library, this chapter explores Hughes's utilization of both poetic and visual materials to chronicle the experiences of common people in the maw of global capitalist crisis. Chapter 2, “Fusing and Alloy,” considers Muriel Rukeyser's groundbreaking The Book of the Dead (1938). In addition to providing close readings of some of The Book of The Dead's most riveting passages, Ehlers charts Rukeyser's efforts to convert the experimental poem sequence into a documentary film.

Chapters 3 and 4 are linked under the heading “Lyric.” Chapter 3, “Lyric Effects,” maps both Genevieve Taggard and Edwin Rolfe's radical conceptualization of a “lyric ideal” (22) to counteract what they saw as traditional lyric poetry's complicity with “a crumbling economic system and defunct bourgeois literary order” (8). Chapter 4, “Lyric Internationalism: Jacques Roumain and His Committees,” discusses the radical Haitian poet's specific brand of communist internationalism. By considering Roumain's dedication to anti-imperialism in conjunction with his relations to American poets (Hughes especially), Ehlers unearths the transnational registers of Jacques Roumain's lyric persona.

Part 3, “Rhythm,” comprises only one chapter, “The Left Needs Rhythm,” and attends to the work of lesser-known Jewish American communist poet Martha Millet. Through an examination of Millet's leftist nursery rhymes, Ehlers elucidates the poet's belief in the importance of rhythm, a primal and essential element which would give voice to social revolution.

The literary scholar is likely to find Ehlers's theorization of “alloy” particularly enchanting. Found in her explication of the “George Robinson: Blues” segment of The Book of the Dead, Ehlers categorizes Rukeyser's poems as “attempts to represent political personhood fusing with historical material and economic reality” (85), later encouraging her reader to comprehend “the acts of expression in The Book of the Dead as complex alloys that destabilize the dichotomies between inside and outside, subjective and objective” (86). Ehlers's use of alloy at once stands in as a wonderful metaphor for poetry's relation to history, while also providing a suitable model for untangling what has become something of an aporia in the study of leftist literature – the paradoxical relationship between the individual and the collective.

Taken together, there is much to laud in Ehlers's ambitious and cogent study. Its deft analysis and inclusion of visual archival scans make for an interesting and engaging read. With so much to praise, we can perhaps forgive the author for making a minor factual error in her epilogue concerning one John Cusack, who is misidentified as Ed Norton in her discussion of Tim Robbins's equally ambitious film Cradle Will Rock (1999).